


The Long Twilight Struggle

by ItinerantPedant



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cold War Three, Espionage, F/F, F/M, Political Polemics, Snark and Sarcasm, Space Opera, Weird Societies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2020-02-16 09:42:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 31,943
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18688945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItinerantPedant/pseuds/ItinerantPedant
Summary: An original novel, set in a future.  Neither utopia or dystopia, but a world that could be the result of choices we make...if we are both lucky and unlucky.





	1. Front Notes

So here are the first 3,500 or so words of what ought to end up a 90,000 to 100,000 word novel that is tentatively titled, “The Long Twilight Struggle” as you can see from what I called it here. Though I’m open to title improvements. In part because I just mentally shortened that to “Twilight” and I feel dirty. I’m also just calling the Chapters 1 through whatever. 

That’s the structure of it.

No doubt you are here because you liked my last series well enough to subscribe to me…I see I have 15 of you. This is my first original work and if you liked “Agent” well enough to subscribe, this one is a little different. Not a LOT different. But I’m ACTIVELY soliciting feedback. Fanfiction readers are discerning readers, with experience about a range of issues…and that makes you great beta readers.

Beta readers come in two groups, general “Does this plot work? Does this character work? I’m confused about this point here, maybe you can make it clearer?” readers and subject matter expert readers. As you will see, if anyone out there is good at physics, I’d love to know if what I’m discussing is plausible (note: the story involves moving faster than light…so I’m not even going to USE the word “possible”). But further, if for example, in this first part, if you know 19th century literary movements, I’d love to hear as well. If you’re genderfluid and I’ve been offensive in any way towards the genderfluid let me know how and why and we can work to correct.

Anyways, long way of saying I welcome robust back and forth in the comments. I replied a LOT in threads in “Agent”…that’s going to go up to 11 here.

 

Some set-up: I’ve got about 10,000 words already written. I really thought I’d be at this point back in December. Guess what? I wasn’t. 

First and foremost, I had work fall on my head in a big way, managing two major projects simultaneously, so that I really just came home mentally SHOT. When I was writing “Agent”, “Ceremony”, and “Plant” I’d come home from work, and to my wife, who’s publishing here under [HBSailin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HBSailin/pseuds/HBSailin), to her continual irritation, I’d write for about three hours and crank out, reliably 1500 to 2500 words. A day. But I didn’t have the mental energy from Nov through Mar to put out a subjunctive clause at the end of the day. That’s one.

Second, and related. The sprint to get “Ceremony” and “Plant” done burned me the fuck out. Even without work on my back, I wasn’t going to be able to write most of Nov through Jan.

Third. Original stuff is HARD. On “Agent” the plotting was done for me. Basic facts were laid out and less mutable than they are in “Struggle”…and even then I was always making small continuity errors (for example: In “Agent” Nora and Piper have Mirelurk Puffs at their Christmas Dinner, where in “Plant” Nora points out that crustaceans like Mirelurks have to be cooked rapidly to avoid bacterial growth and therefore she never uses them for food). I’m only a tenth of the way done, and I bet someone can find me refuting myself already.

But I’m back now. The story is outlined in my head. Just a few days ago the Antagonist finally came into focus and I know what I want to do with them.

 

So here is Chapter One, and to set it up, let’s talk where I’m repeating myself and where I’m not, and why.

The Protagonist is a spy…excuse me…Intelligence Officer…and was frozen for several hundred years. Why something so close to “Agent”? 

Well, the structure of that Fanfic was such that there were some things about the difference between what you EXPECTED from life and what you GOT that I was unable to address and I really still wanted to explore some of them. 

Spies and SF because if this turns out well, I might shop it to agents, and candidly, there is a TON of Urban Fantasy and MilSF out there now. Maybe SpySF is close enough to MilSF to be interesting without having to elbow its way past 200 other, very similar manuscripts.

In this case, as will become obvious, I wanted to talk about what happens when you can’t be what your benefactors want (and need) you to be, but you desperately need their help anyway. The basic premise here, the big idea, is, “How would George Smiley (of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) react if he found himself in a society that, for various reasons, has forgotten what inter-state conflict is like, and thinks something like ‘Bond’ is what spying is?”

“Agent” was about how would Bond act if he found him/herself in a world made of conflict. More nihilistic than he’d ever been. Would he (she) try to be a better person? (Bond is an ASShole, BTW) Why? And then having decided to be better, how would they make a real family, not a fake, for-public-consumption one.

This piece on the other hand is about how would George Smiley act, given the need to fight another Cold War but with a driving need to PRESERVE the basics of his formerly satisfactory life in a society that really doesn’t want to need him but does.

The main character is old, out of shape, married, and at the end of his life. Just to start with. He hates guns, has never had to actually use one (like real spies), and mostly talks his way through things. He’s morally compromised but not fatally so. And he’s stable, and comfortable with who he is, and what he does. He is very much UNlike Nora in that way. 

And his name is Richard Jensen.


	2. Chapter 1

Richard Jensen had had a life. It hadn’t been a particularly good life, but then it had not been a particularly bad one either. He’d had his fair share of successes and failures, emotional highs and emotional lows. The best way to sum up Richard Jensen would be to note that he’d had an effective life.

But it was ending. Cancer had metastasized throughout his body, and even if the various anti-carcinogenic treatments the late Twenty First Century could serve up could have worked, he wouldn’t have availed himself of them.

It was not that he wanted to die, quite the opposite. But medicine had never really been able to change the fundamental unpleasantness of anti-carcinogenic treatments. Cancer was the body acting in a deranged fashion, and anything that attacked cancer also attacked the body. And he’d already been through a round of that, five years earlier.

Once was enough. More than enough in his opinion. Which was how he found himself, surrounded by his family, his two daughters and their husbands, his three grandchildren, and of course his wife in a hospital bed, waiting for the end.

Laura’s round, pleasant, and loving face hovered above his. He barely had the energy to look up but he did, for her. His wife of 35 years was about 5’1” and pleasantly round at 190 pounds. Pleasant to him at least. He loved her more than life itself, and were it a matter of remaining for her, he’d have endured decades of cancer treatment. 

But nothing was going to work. His doctors knew that, his children knew that, his wife knew that, and most importantly Richard knew that. That was why he was in this facility, surrounded by family and waiting for the doctors to come and bring all of this to an end.

“Are you absolutely sure you want to do this, Richard?” asked Laura for the fifteenth time. 

They’d met 38 years earlier when Richard was a Senior Operations Officer and an up and comer within the Central Intelligence Agency, and Laura had been his Section Head. Events had intervened and he’d been the one to end up a CIA Deputy Executive Director for Russian and Near East Operations.

He nodded, then licked his lips and said, “Yes,” in a raspy voice. “And when it’s your time I know you’ll join me. It’s already been paid for.”

She nodded, tears in her eyes, “I know, sweetie. I’ll see you soon.”

His first daughter, Olivia, stood behind her mom. Her eyes were swimming. When Richard had told his family of his and Laura’s decision, his for the pain and inevitability of his demise, and hers to follow him for love when time came, if possible, Olivia had been incandescent with anger. 

She had come around. Laura and Richard were both practical, prosaic people. Their two daughters, Olivia and Eleanor, had tried rebelling against that aspect of their personality. But the thing about practicality was that it was annoyingly…practical. They’d eventually followed their parents’ example, and never strayed far from ‘things done for good and rational reasons’.

Fast, as with Eleanor, or slow, as with Olivia, their daughters had come around. Even as Olivia, who’d always been a bit headstrong, informed them that she had no intention of joining them, and didn’t want to. “When it’s my time, it will be my time. So this will be goodbye, dad,” she’d said.

Now, however, she was crying, and she leaned down and murmured, “I love you, daddy. I’ll miss you.”

Richard smiled up tenderly at his firstborn. “I’ll miss you too, Widget,” he said, “But you know…”

She nodded her head, “It’s say good-bye now or say good-bye in a just a month or two, with no hope of a resurrection.”

“I’m going anyway,” he said, “Might as well take one last leap.” Then he pointed to her belly, 6 months along. “I wish I could have stayed for Joshua’s birth. You’re eating at least fish, right?”

“Yes, daddy,” she said, laughing through her tears.

Then Eleanor leaned down, kissed him on the forehead, and whispered in his ear, “Don’t take any shit from the future, dad.”

He chuckled, then coughed. Eventually the spasm passed. He looked over at his three grandchildren, and at Olivia with the fourth on the way, and said, “I love you all. Be good.”

Then the doctors, who’d been waiting patiently, nodded to his family and then released the clamps on his wheels, and rolled him down the hallway and into an elevator. As they sank into the fifth sub-basement, they watched him with concern. It wouldn’t do for everything to fall apart at this late date. It had happened before. Even with the advances in cryonics, fundamentally healthy people were not freezing themselves.

When they arrived at the cryonics facility, they placed him into a long, tubular apparatus, and injected his IV line with a combination rapid dehydrator and sedative, and then removed his line. The lid on the tube hissed shut, and the last thing Richard remembered was thinking about Laura and his family, and hearing several clunks as valves opened to flood his tube with liquid nitrogen from 10 high speed nozzles.

 

A warm fuzzy feeling, with limbs that felt swaddled in cotton balls. As pieces of him began to move slightly, Richard felt a lack. A lack of aches and pains, no residual throb from a foot broken many years earlier. And most of all, no nagging, persistent, inescapable pain from the imminent shutdown of his body from cancer. More than anything, the absence of that convinced Richard that…

_I made it. They figured out how to thaw people out and cure cancer, and they finally got around to fixing me._

He cracked his eyes. It was bright, too bright. He squinted and tried to make out his surroundings. As his eyes adjusted to what was actually quite dim light, he saw that the room he was in was a cheerful multi-colored affair, with colors that while not exactly clashing certainly were more vibrant than he was used to in general, let alone in what he assumed was a hospital.

He heard thunderous footsteps as if someone was wearing tap shoes attached to heavy boots. A face hovered over his. They were blond and blue eyed, youthful and androgynous. The person smiled and shouted, “Director Jensen. It’s good to see you’re awake.”

Richard tried to raise an arm and found it strapped down. The person above him smiled again, and, as his ears acclimated, said in what he perceived as a slightly more normal tone, “Let me adjust the bed,” and then they reached behind Richard’s head, and when their hand pulled back, the bed sat Richard up, comfortably.

Richard looked about and, while the color scheme was not a typical hospital, much was. There was a table that was made to roll alongside his bed. The bed had rails. But in many ways, the room looked strange, and a little unsettling. There was no privacy curtain, and the bed did not have buttons that he could see.

“What…” started Richard. He stopped, and coughed, dry mouthed. The person gave him a sip of water, cold and refreshing. Surprisingly pure in fact.

“What year is it?” Richard finally was able to ask.

The person, presumably a doctor or nurse…some sort of caregiver at the very least, smiled and gestured at Richard. “Very good. Already both alert and oriented. It’s 2432. July 21, 2432.”

Richard looked up at them, “It took that long to find a cure for cancer?”

The doctor looked surprised, “Oh, no,” and they gestured at thin air. “That was finally eradicated in 2096, when the final forms of prostate cancer were comprehensively mapped and targeted enzymes were created.”

_That was so close to when I went under._

“Then it took you that long to figure out how to thaw out the sleepers?”

Again his doctor looked puzzled, “No,” gestures at thin air, “The process that enabled that was perfected in 2212.”

“Then it took that long to get around to me?”

Again the gestures, and a pause, “Oh dear. I’ve reviewed the documents that you signed when you were frozen. That does explain quite a bit. No. You’re one of the first sleepers ever awoken.”

Richard reached the limit of his patience. The room was unsettling, and he was dealing with someone who prefaced every statement with a series of mystical gestures. “What the hell are you twiddling your fingers at? And what do you mean, one of the first?”

They said, “Let me enable your network interface,” and again the gestures, but this time when they finished, Richard heard a voice. In his head.

“Hi! I’m your version 6.7 Universal Network Interface. Would you like help setting up your preferences?”

There was a pair of floating boxes in front of Richard, one that said ‘Yes, please!’ and another reading ‘Not right now, thanks!’.

Richard asked, “What am I supposed to do with these?”

The doctor said, “Oh. You must be in the setup screen. Let me release your arms.”

Richard looked over at the doctor, and finally looked down along his body. Gone was his considerable gut, gained over decades of desk work. And his hands, when he raised them, were not age wrinkled. Richard waved his hand in front of his face, and by accident, his hand went through ‘Not right now, thanks!’

The display cleared and voice said, “Thanks, and have a nice day.”

“What the hell?” asked Richard.

“Now you set up your interface,” said his doctor, and as Richard looked at them, the interface put an overlay above their head, presumably visible only to Richard, that informed Richard of their name, Dr. Marjorie Spotswood, their years in practice, 45, their pronoun preferences…they/them/their…and their rating, 3.2.

“I just accidentally waved at ‘Not right now, thanks!’ and everything has disappeared,” said Richard. “Why the hell can it talk to me but I can’t talk to it?” he then asked.

Dr. Spotswood answered, “Well, that’s because the voice recognition software never really got the hang of extreme linguistic dialects, so after the notorious Edinburgh Incident in Scotland the year version 1.5 was released, the CentGov mandated that while the network can talk to you and can be voice activated, any specific commands must be physically entered into the retinal interface.”

“Okay, then, how do I call it up?”

“Oh, before you enable voice activation…,” The Doctor paused for a short period, then showed Richard a series of gestures. When Richard copied the doctor, the interface spoke again.

“Hi. Would you like to continue your setup?”

This time Richard pressed “Yes, please!”

The next entry was, “What is my name for verbal recall?”

Richard thought for a moment, and while he was sorely tempted to call the interface something scatological, he imagined constantly calling out, “Hey, Asshat!” and thought better. Then he remembered a long ago science fiction movie, and settled on “Klaatu”. 

Klaatu then asked him, “You can use a verbal summons, only, as well as gestures. Is there a phrase you would like to use?” then showed a “Yes, Please!” and a “No, Thanks!”

Richard began laughing as he selected yes…then after Klaatu said, “Please speak the activation phrase,” he responded, “Klaatu Barada Nikto.”

He began laughing harder when Klaatu said, “Please repeat the phrase.”

After a string of “Klaatu Barada Nikto”s like some kind of demented “Day The Earth Stood Still” fan convention, Klaatu finally said, “Acknowledged.”

Then Richard answered a series of interface standards, such as “Name Display” (he selected “Active”), and “Public Information”, which was set to “On Request” as well as other display preferences.

At that point he finally looked over at the doctor and said, “OK, why exactly am I one of the first sleepers awakened, 350 years plus after I was frozen?”

The doctor looked a little abashed. “We needed someone like you. Up until now we’ve never had a need for a sleepers’ skill set before. Candidly, as a group you never had much to offer us.”

At Richard’s raised eyebrow, the doctor cleared his throat and said, “It’s the Twenty Fifth century. No offense, but there isn’t much call for blacksmiths or web-designers or wood-chippers or many of the obsolete skills from history.”

“Until now,” said Richard, “But if we were so useless why keep us alive, or kind of alive, at all?”

The doctor looked appalled. “You had contracts. When society merged into CentGov after the Big Collapse, one of the few ways we could ensure that we could end the remaining unrest was to state that all corporate contracts would be honored by the successor society until their expiration. Sleeper contracts are extremely long term, by design. Nobody would unplug you just to save a little bit of electricity or storage space and risk actual revolution again, not when both space and electricity were so easy to come by.”

“The Big Collapse?”

“Heard of the Great Depression?”

“Yeeeess…”

“Well imagine that instead of a recession or depression, the foundation of economics was destroyed overnight by the release of programmable constructor nanobots,” said the doctor, “And that overnight the scarcity of resources that every aspect of the social structure depended on disappeared.”

“This is a post-scarcity society?” asked Richard.

“Hardly,” said the doctor, “Or we’d have long ago thawed you out. No, THINGS stopped being scarce. Time never stopped being scarce, gainful employment never stopped being scarce, in fact it got more so, as many professions surrounding the making, transport, and commerce of ‘things’ disappeared quite rapidly. It wasn’t pleasant.”

“By not pleasant, you mean…”

“Violence. War. Terrorism. Bio-weapons. The deaths of about eighty percent of humanity at the time.”

“Eighty percent…”

“A little under 10 billion people, actually. Eighty-two point six percent to be precise.”

“My god.”

“We were lucky to avoid nuclear war, but just barely. Multiple nations and non-governmental organizations sent seeder ships to other star systems as a desperate attempt to preserve something. Social disruptions are never entirely benign, and something that disruptive was bound to set off the Collapse, no matter how well intentioned the motives of the people who released the source code and design of the first constructor nanobots. Which is something we’ll actually never know.”

“Who were the people who released the tech?” Richard said, horrified despite the fact that he’d slept through it and it had nothing to do with his current situation.

“Also something we’ll never know,” said the doctor.

There was the sound of a clearing throat from the doorway, and Richard saw two more people, this time clearly a male and female, there. Hovering over them were two names, the male named “Jonathon Dicks” and the female named “Hannelore Forrer.”

Hannelore said, “We’ll take it from here, Dr. Spottswood.”

The doctor nodded and said, “He’s all set. He can leave with you whenever you’re ready.”

 

As the doctor left the room, the two newcomers closed the door.

The woman, Hannelore, said, “As you may have guessed, we have a need for your skills.”

Richard said, “I was getting that impression. The good doctor gave me the distinct impression that your ‘CentGov’ doesn’t do charity.”

The man, Jonathon, grimaced and said, “The Central Government is plenty charitable, to our citizens. You and the other sleepers are not citizens. Should we stress a system precisely balanced between life-expectancy, forecast death rates, gainful employment opportunities, and environmental impact for the sake of people who chose to check out of life of their own free will?”

Hannelore put her hand on Jonathon, and interrupted, “All of this is beside the point. Director Jensen, we find ourselves in need of your assistance.”

_Ah. Good cop, bad cop. But they seem to be running ‘Crabby Cop’ and ‘Matter of Fact Cop’ instead._

“How so? I was also given to understand that we sleepers didn’t have useful skills. What need do you have for a government bureaucrat?” asked Richard.

“We already have plenty of government…” began Jonathon, when Hannelore once again interrupted.

“We don’t need any government bureaucrat, Director. We need a very specific set of skills,” she said, then gestured for Richard to get out of bed.

As Richard got up, and found himself in a comfortable set of pajamas rather than a backless hospital gown, he said, “I’m guessing that calling me ‘Director’ is an important clue.”

Richard finally saw himself in the mirror. He looked like an idealized 30 year old version of himself, with close cropped sandy blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, in a ruggedly handsome face. His hair had been brown, his eyes a much less striking blue, and his face, while adequate, had never screamed ‘leading man’ at any point of his life.

He looked like a movie version of…

“We need your expertise as a spy, Director Jensen,” said Hannalore.

There was a long pause.

“Normally we were called Intelligence Officers,” replied Richard.

“So?” asked Jonathon. “We’re more honest, I guess. There hasn’t been any need for you since the Collapse.”

_He’s seriously trying my patience._

Hannelore shook her head, “That’s immaterial. We now find ourselves actually in need of your talents.”

“Why? Your centralized state collapse?”

Jonathon and Hannelore shook their heads No, as Richard went on, “Terrorists? Criminals?”

They shook their heads again. He said exasperated, “Aliens?”

“After a manner of speaking,” said Jonathon.

“Oh come on,” replied Richard.

“In a manner of speaking,” repeated Hannelore, “We made them ourselves.”

“Huh? OH!” said Richard, “Those ships Dr. Spottswood mentioned…”

Hannelore nodded. “They left in a tearing hurry, from a planet coming apart, carrying genetic material and nanobots tailored to set up infrastructure and growth crèches. And all the planets have developed in splendid isolation ever since.”

Richard looked skeptical, “Surely you receive their transmissions? You can see everything they’re up to, up to however many years ago they are away.”

Jonathon shook his head, “It takes a lot of power to push radio signals out. The inverse square law is unforgiving. It pretty much has to be intentional to reach us in a decipherable state. Several colonies have remained in contact, once they got a sufficient power source set up. But more never bothered, and…” he looked pained.

Hannelore added, “And some never wanted to. Either they considered us dangerous…which was not unreasonable given conditions when they left…or they wanted to hide themselves from us.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Richard.

“We’ll get to that part in a minute,” said Jonathon.

Hannelore went on, “Then, some 4 years ago, scientists on Earth found a way to break the law.”

At Richard’s look she smiled and added, “The speed of light. They harnessed the quantum tunneling effect to create the Flicker Drive…engines that ‘traveled’ faster than light. Although each jump is a short…comparatively speaking…distance, if you repeat it fast enough, you ‘move’ faster than light.”

Richard nodded for her to continue. Hannelore smiled, and said, “Ah. You understand then?”

Richard shook his head, “Not even a little. I’m just taking it on faith that you’re right. The odds that someone would play this elaborate a practical joke is vanishingly small. Therefore you are who you say you are and I am therefore compelled to accept you found a way to tell Einstein and the rest to sit down and shut up.”

Hannelore nodded, “So we began reaching out to the colony planets…”

Richard interrupted, “And by reaching out you mean…?”

“Going there,” Hannelore said, “The first time was quite uneventful. Miroir was a French colony, and contact was fairly straightforward. Once we arrived, normal relations were easy to set up. They welcomed contact, declined to join CentGov, offered some artistic items as trade…”

“Because they’re French,” Richard joked.

“No dummy, because most planets are self-sustaining and intellectual property is about the only thing that might differ from place to place when nanobots exist. What are they gonna ship us? Beef? Metals?” snapped Jonathon.

Hannelore raised a hand, but Richard interrupted, “No. That’s fair, I didn’t think it through.”

“Of course,” he added looking at Jonathon, “I’ve only had a few hours to consider the implications of a post-scarcity economy, so maybe a little slack for the old man who has something you need is in order. Speaking of which…”

“We haven’t gotten to why you’re awake,” said Hannelore. “At any rate,” she went on, “We held talks. They were productive, friendly and peaceful. Ultimately, they expressed an interest in being given the secret to the ships. We declined. They were disappointed. But not that disappointed. We moved on. It was at the next planet, Haven, that…”

“The shitshow started,” said Jonathon. Hannelore nodded her head, and Jonathon continued.

“I’m sure it won’t shock you to learn that with ships cheaply constructed by nanobots working with a batch of raw material, and leaving at a time when the death rate had already climbed well past a billion and was accelerating…that the possibility was very high that any given ship might be stocked with genetic material that had been carefully pre-selected without any outside ethical review, and with historical records that had been even more carefully pre-edited…in short, purpose designed to produce a particular result, whether or not that result was particularly praiseworthy.”

“Fuck me,” interrupted Richard.

“I don’t know what species of sociopath you were thinking about but in this case, Haven was settled by people from the American South who very much were the type to refer to the American Civil War as ‘The War of Northern Aggression’.”

Richard winced, and Jonathon went on, “I’m not done. They didn’t just send Caucasian genetic material on the seeder ship. And they very, very heavily edited the records that they sent. They sent the ship with a built in slave population. Based on what we’ve learned other ways, they were fed a version of Earth history that would have considered Apartheid-Era South Africa ridiculously open minded.”

Richard went pale, and Jonathon nodded. 

“A slaveholding society doesn’t exactly show itself as such from orbit, and video transmissions from a heavily censored society don’t run loops of whippings 24/7. By the time the spacecraft crew figured out what was going on, it was too late. They’d been attacked and their ship seized. Then the Havenites used records from that ship to backtrack to Miroir.”

“Where they got a shock, I’m guessing,” Richard said.

Jonathon nodded, surprised. “How did you know?”

“I’m a...I was an American. I know all the French jokes. I’ve also worked with the DGSE, French Intelligence, on occasion, and the French could be incredibly ruthless when they wanted to be. I can only imagine what the Havenites thought they’d find, but I can tell you what I suspect they did find. A society that was not interested in their shit, and pretty belligerent about their disinterest.”

Jonathon nodded. “The war had been going for 8 months when our next ship called at Miroir but the Havenites really hadn’t made much progress and were being slowly eliminated. When the Miriorouis realized who had arrived in their system, they contacted us. They’d already shot down two Havenite ships using hypersonic missiles their nanos had produced. Everyone was discovering that with roughly equal technology, and with nanobots, the ability to wear down or conquer a nation over interstellar distances may not be possible. Certainly, the Havenites sent no more ships after the first two, and the Miroirouis had managed to kill or capture the vast majority of the Havenites on their planet…though the remnants were proving difficult.”

Hannelore said, “At that point they were willing to join up with Earth, if only for access to FTL tech. The Alliance Interstellaire de la Liberté is kind of their idea…while they didn’t want to subject themselves to CentGov, they certainly saw the advantages in banding together. And frankly, some of their weapon designs were ingenious. So it’s a…”

“United Federation of Planets Against Dickheads?” Richard interrupted.

“Well, that’s blunter than the AIL officials would put it…” said Hannelore.

“…but, yeah, pretty much,” finished Jonathon.


	3. Chapter 2

Several days later Richard was walking along a corridor in CentGov’s military headquarters, whistling to himself. He was alive. He was young. He was devastatingly handsome.

He’d brought up his stupendously good looks to Hannelore and Jonathon after they’d outlined the very absolute basics of the situation into which he’d awakened. As he’d asked the question, he noticed that Hannelore was very…VERY…pretty, and Jonathon was the kind of handsome that even straight men noticed. The answer was, of course, obvious. 

Nanobots had affected standards of beauty as in so many other ways. Glasses had long ago gone the way of the dodo. With nanos to modify literally anything at will, no blemish was anything but intentional. 

Nor for that matter was anything else. In response to a frankly rude question from Richard, the person equipping Richard for his forthcoming ‘mission’ had informed him that zey had chosen genderfluidity, that zer chosen pronouns…’ze, zim, zer’…were a matter of public Interface records and available to all, so not using them was rude, and that what was actually between zer legs was none of his damned business until and unless he was invited, privately, to find out.

After THAT fiasco, Richard was careful to check the “Preferred Pronouns” over the display of everyone he spoke with before he did anything else, as that was a quick and dirty guide to how the person in question was likely to respond in any one of a number of ways. He was actually surprised that the vast majority of humanity was actually satisfied with the gender of their birth, and mostly the heterosexual orientation corresponding to their birth gender. As it turned out, when there was ample technological means to compel a human body to meet its owner’s wishes most, but not all, of them picked what several billion years of evolution had laid out. And for those for whom evolution had NOT resulted in the preferred outcome, the nanos stepped in.

In many ways, thanks to the nanos, a great number of idiotic issues had been dealt with. If you wanted to be female, but were born male, the nanos would rectify the situation. Decide that hadn’t actually been what you wanted? Other nanos. Most human beings at least experimented. Usually during a period in what was still called ‘college’. Sometime after that, most people settled down on one biological gender and orientation or another. Some never settled down. Mostly they ended up with partners who didn’t mind. Humans being humans, some refused to pick and then resented not finding someone who didn’t mind. Even a post-scarcity society couldn’t resolve every aspect of human nature.

So as he walked to the briefing, he reviewed that last few days. Nanos did a lot of things for humanity at this point, but one major item was facilitating healing rates that were frankly almost magical in their speed. Richard had gone from ‘popsicle’ to ‘Olympic athlete’ in less than two days.

Going to ‘Olympic athlete’ at all was a minor miracle. Early in his life he’d been rail thin, and then as he’d entered middle age, rather round to quite round…at least until the cancer hit. Now he was a muscular idealized version of himself, with a side order of movie star. 

He’d also had to confront some…interesting…notions on the part of his CentGov superiors. Most of what they knew about spying and intelligence work was heavily influenced by movies from the 20th and 21st century. Which wasn’t troubling to Richard until Fred, the person equipping him, had finished the more mundane parts of the brief. 

Ze had turned to a device with a resemblance to a 21st century pistol. As ze was talking, Richard had tuned zer out. Which proved a mistake when ze turned, aimed the item, and said, “As you pull the trigger, the rangefinder determines the exact distance to your target, and then a micro-pellet ’tunnels’ to the center of the target and…” and at that moment a dummy exploded. Messily.

“What the hell just happened?” Richard shouted.

“You weren’t listening,” said Fred, “So I gave you an example.”

“Jesus, no. I get that. What did that gun DO?!?”

“Oh. It ’tunneled’ a pellet to the center of the target, but since the space was occupied by more than some easily displaced air molecules…”

“It freaking exploded?!?” Richard said.

Fred nodded, and then ze said, “But that’s not the neat part.”

Richard interrupted, “That’s not the ‘neat’ part? What in hell constitutes the ‘neat’ part?”

“This,” ze said, and turned to another mannequin, behind a wall. Ze aimed again, but then thumbed a dial just below the safety. Satisfied, ze squeezed the trigger…and the mannequin exploded. The wall was untouched.

“It shoots through walls?!?”

“Well technically, it shoots PAST walls, but pretty much,” Fred nodded.

“Do the other guys have these fucking things?” Richard asked.

Fred shrugged. “The Miroirouis came up with them, so maybe the Havenites got the plans out at some point. Maybe?”

“Maybe? Jesus, I could just be standing there and…boom…with no warning and no idea?”

“Sure, I guess,” ze said.

Then and there Richard silently resolved to never ever get into a shootout. In fact, it would be best if he never picked up that damned weapon with the intent of doing more than moving it from one place to another. That matter settled, he gestured for Fred to continue.

Fred nodded and handed him a glass of water. “Here, drink this.”

Richard took a big gulp. Fred looked on with great interest, and minutely relaxed after about thirty seconds. Richard looked at zer. “What?”

Fred nodded, “You just drank about 150 mL of pure cyclosarin.”

Richard carefully placed the glass on the lab bench and then shouted, “You had me drink pure GF nerve agent?”

Ze nodded. “Are you dead? Nanos. You could eat pure garbage and never notice.”

“You could have just told me!”

Ze nodded. “True, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.”

“You’re a dick!”

“I told you, what’s between…”

“Right now the only reason I care what’s between your legs is to know if kicking you there would do any good!”

Fred smiled, “Well that’s honest at least. And it’s not an uncommon reaction, honestly.”

Richard growled, “Anything else?”

Fred shook zer head, “Nope. Off with you.”

Which had ended with Richard walking through the corridor on his way to a briefing intended to show him exactly what he was getting into. The episode with a genderfluid ‘Q’ having set the tone, Richard was ready for almost anything. Up to and including sitting down and having someone drop a live tarantula in his lap because it had happened in Dr. No.

What he got was a standard briefing. Which was possibly the most surprising part. Jonathon and Hannelore were there as well as a new player, his nominal boss, Evelyn Dean. Ms. Dean shook his hand and started, “I’m sure you’ve been briefed in any one of a number of ways but let me give you the overview and why you’re here.”

“Why you need someone so bad you thawed out a fossil,” said Richard, nodding at Hannelore and Jonathon, “These two made sure I knew exactly where I stood.”

Hannelore started, but Richard raised a hand, “Spare me. If I weren’t who you needed your protestations might work, but since I suspect I am, let’s dispense with the bullshit, huh?” 

“Let us, as you say, dispense with the bullshit,” said Dean. “We do need your skill set. You are the most senior, pre-CentGov, Intelligence Officer available, and we have gone to great pains to couple your skill set with a body equal to the task.”

“That task being…?” Richard said, eyebrows up.

“Neutralize Haven as an interstellar power. Secure the position of the AIL. Figure out a way to eliminate external threats.”

“Oh well, no biggie, then.”

“If we could…”

“If you could do it without me, you would. You can’t.”

Richard gestured at Hannelore and Jonathon, “These two told me that the Havenites bogged down on Miroir. They couldn’t seal the deal. And you’re pretty sure you can’t invade Haven and make it stick. There’s no such thing as a war of attrition with nanos, is there?”

Dean shook her head no. “You’ve admirably described the problem, Director.”

Richard smiled, but not pleasantly. It was a cynical smile. “And just as with Cold Wars One and Two, you’ve realized if you can’t get what you want with direct action…hot wars…you’ll settle for the ‘long twilight struggle’.”

“As you say.”

“I do. Well, at a minimum, I need Laura,” Richard said.

“Laura?” asked Dean.

Hannelore leaned forward, “His wife.”

Dean frowned, “Was she even frozen?”

Hannelore nodded, “Yes, she is in the facility we pulled Director Jenkins from.”

_Yes!! Laura is alive. And close. Hang on honey…_

“So?” asked Dean.

“She was head of station in Moscow when I was there. She was the Director of Training towards the end of her career. I need her,” Richard said, and at Dean’s look, he added, “As an asset.”

“As an asset,” Dean said.

“Well, I won’t deny I want her back. But she…”

Dean interrupted, “We’ll see. Frankly, even thawing you out involved compromises I’d rather not repeat.”

“But…”

“Continue with your assessment Director. Dazzle me with your understanding.”

_Hang on sweetheart. I’m doing my best, and as fast as I can._

“So at this point, you’re going to try arranging to have won before you even fight,” said Richard.

 

CentGov had some seriously unrealistic notions about what an Intelligence Officer could accomplish. They weren’t quite, “Seduce your way into a Swiss Chalet and blow up the enemies lair,” level notions, but more like the kind of expectations Winston Churchill had when he said, “Set Europe ablaze,” with little to no notion how difficult said arson would be.

Or most accurately, CentGov thought Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, was a credible exemplar of the possibilities of spying. Fleming had been an SIS, aka MI-6, agent during the aforementioned blaze setting and was the originator of a plan, for example, to steal a German Enigma machine not by suborning an operator and getting it out with them, but by stealing a German Bomber, ditching it near a German Naval Base, and then overpowering the rescue crew and stealing the Enigma unit presumably carried on the boat. 

A plan that ignored the difficulty of ensuring a rescue crew came on an Enigma equipped ship. That ignored the likelihood that 10 or so men dressed as a bomber crew could overpower an entire ship no matter how great the element of surprise. And finally, that ignored that a German bomber, much like its English counterparts, was not a ship and thus rather more likely than not to sink well before any rescuers could find them. This last point was rather tartly pointed out by the RAF.

All this, and other examples such as the Bay of Pigs from the CIA’s own history, were running through Richard’s mind as he listened to Evelyn Dean’s expectations. Since a straightforward military triumph was utterly unobtainable under current conditions, CentGov and AIL desperately were looking for a way to succeed through alternate means.

“You’re not wrong,” Richard interrupted Dean as she outlined the situation for him, “Containing Haven has to be your goal, using all means shy of face to face conflict. But what that actually means is a long series of proxy wars, unpleasant as it might be to contemplate, coupled with intelligence work to reveal Havenite intentions, and to develop local opposition to their agents provocateur, assuming they’ve reached the same conclusions that AIL has reached.”

Dean opened her mouth, and Richard raised his hand, “THAT is why I asked for Laura. She’s my wife, yes. I want her awoken, yes. But I need her background in training, to develop CentGov and AIL agents, and then to deploy them.”

Dean shook her head. “You do not understand Director. You might have convinced me, but I’m already out on a limb. I need to deal with a situation out there, right now, and maybe, if you can deal with the problem at hand, maybe we will have the credibility to do things your way.”

Richard looked over at Dean. There was no give in her expression.

_Either she is very good at this, or she really is at the end of whatever tether she has available._

He was inclined, on long experience recruiting talent, to believe the latter.

He sighed, “All right. Let’s hear what kind of horror show we have to handle first before we can get your superiors to listen to reason.”

Dean relaxed, visibly, as did Jonathon and Hannelore. They hadn’t been bluffing. They really were at the end of their tether. Thawing out Richard really had been a desperation play.

She called up a holographic display of a planet. She began, “Balzac was settled not by a national group but by a literary movement. Scholars of 19th Century literature funded and sent a seeder ship here. Over the intervening two centuries of development, the planet has broken up into three major camps: Romantics, Realists, and Naturalists.”

Richard nodded and Dean continued, “If you were assuming that the Romantics were all about wild emotion and excess, and the Realists were about life as it is, you’d be right. If, however, you’re assuming that the Naturalists are about ecology, guess again.”

Richard‘s eyebrows went up, “I had been actually. They’re not?”

Dean shook her head, “No. That’d be the Romantics…back to nature and all that. No, the Naturalists follow more of a scientific method _über alles_ approach…verging on Social Darwinism and pre-determination, on a genetic rather than religious basis.”

Richard sighed, “I’m guessing from a time frame and philosophical standpoint our ‘friends’ on Haven found themselves some kindred spirits?”

Dean shrugged, “A sympathetic audience at the very least.”

“Are we talking nations calling themselves Romantics and Naturalists, or are they political parties, or what?” asked Richard.

“Political parties inside an ‘Or what’ casing more like. Initial reports are not clear to the extent to which the philosophical movements inform their politics or vice versa.”

Richard shook his head, “So you want me to, what, eliminate the Naturalists? Neuter them? Stage a coup, what?”

Dean said, “What we want is for the planet to join the AIL, regardless of whether the Naturalists are eliminated, rendered moot, or brought inside the big tent. CentGov has a very utilitarian notion of its goals. As far as both CentGov and AIL are concerned, an alliance with Haven is the one and only definition of ‘not the greatest good for the greatest number’.”

“So my goals are actually fairly limited within the framework. Find a way to eliminate, discredit, or co-opt the Havenites and any Naturalist allies? I’m assuming there IS Havenite interference, yes?”

Dean nodded. “Our ship, the ESS Undaunted,” and as Richard glanced over sharply, Dean interrupted herself, “One of the folks in the CG Space Administration is a huge historical navy fan, and pulled out a list of Royal Navy shipnames, and slipped them into the queue. They were only caught when they got careless and included ‘Warspite’. Not that the crew of the Indefatigable mind…they claim it refers to the crew’s sexual stamina. Don’t ask.”

Dean shook her head, “At any rate, the Undaunted reported a Havenite ship off Balzac, and it set off alarm bells. We’ve met three planets first, and two have joined, and met one planet unremittingly Havenite and hostile. This is the first time both sides hit a planet roughly simultaneously.”

“So it’s really the first time both sides have been in a position to affect the outcome one way or another,” observed Richard.

Dean nodded. “If you want your wife back, Director? It would be best if you managed to stop the Havenites, and brought Balzac into the fold, so to speak.”

Richard looked up at Evelyn sharply. She looked back calmly. Unforgiving. The road back to his wife’s existence ran through this woman, her government, a group of racist slaveholding fanatics, and a group of literary enthusiasts.

It was going to be a long second life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More background on how nanos work. Because the implications run-through everything. 
> 
> But I do worry that I'm bogging this down in background. Let me know.
> 
> Ian Fleming really DID propose that utterly RIDICULOUS plan and was only stopped by the ever practical RAF (Hugh Dowding spent far more time pouring over pilot training status and aircraft production rates than to almost anything else during the Battle of Britain...and he was very correct to have done so).
> 
> I've tried to lay out the rules of nanos, so that the "magic" has rules. There are things they can and can't do...they can convert almost anything into an equal mass of almost anything else. But they can't produce things from thin air. Well, other than thin other kinds of air.


	4. Chapter 3

A week later Richard found himself at San Antonio de Pichincha, Ecuador some 25 kilometers north of Quito, ready to board a beanstalk. While nanos meant the material of the beanstalk wasn’t an issue in terms of stress it was easier to site the beanstalk as close to the equator as possible. San Antonio was exactly on the equator and there would be no deflection.

He looked up at the construction that more accurately looked like a skyscraper that just wouldn’t quit than a “cable”, as it vanished into the sky. 

_Oh brave new world that has such wonders…_ “SHIT!” Richard burst out as a large cylindrical structure shot upwards and disappeared almost instantly followed by a distant boom. Hannelore laughed behind him.

“It has to go thirty six thousand kilometers. Even at a five hour trip, that’s six thousand kilometers per hour, Mach 4. It actually starts slower until it gets to the stratosphere.”

“You said, ‘Space Elevator’. I didn’t visualize, ‘House shooting straight up like a gunshot’. I should’ve, I guess,” Richard replied.

Hannelore shrugged and gestured for him to proceed, “Why? You were frozen almost 4 centuries ago and we didn’t pick you for your science background. It would be like someone from your era thawing out,” and here she began gesturing and then said, “Oliver Cromwell, and expecting him to understand what a plane takeoff was like based on the phrase, ‘Aerial Coach’.”

Richard shook his head. _You guys just can’t help being a little bit of an asshole, can you? You couldn’t deal with this yourself and you’re not so prideful that you’re willing to lose large segments of humanity to violent, slaveholding bigots, but you do still resent me a little bit. Ah, well, I’ve dealt with far worse. ___

____

____

“True,” said Richard, as they went into the spaceport/elevator lobby. He looked around, amazed. The airy arches and supports enclosed an arboretum that looked more like a park than a transport terminal. There was mass of humanity in the facility, but rather less than Richard expected. There were four enormous platforms, one of which contained what looked to Richard like a cylindrical office building attached to one of the four sides of the gargantuan ‘cable’.

Jonathon pointed it the building. “The next cab departs in a bit over an hour. We should head over.”

Richard looked around. This would be his first time off his native planet. It would be his first trip in anything moving faster than super-cruise passenger jetliners. It would be a lot of things, and he badly needed to pee.

He looked over at his minders. “Ummm…,” he started.

Jonathon smiled, “There will be bathrooms aboard Number 3,” he said.

“You call them by numbers?” Richard asked. 

“Did you name cars back in the Twenty-First Century?” answered Jonathon.

“Well, some people did, but not the majority of them. I take your point,” said Richard. He followed Jonathon into the cab.

After he’d found the bathroom, he wandered back to Hannelore and Jonathon, who’d already taken their seats. At a low table. In comfy, squishy chairs. Richard raised his eyebrows, “Aren’t there any acceleration couches? This thing should get moving extremely quickly.”

Hannelore said, “No. The quantum mechanics research that led to the Flicker Drive came from some refinements of the gravity manipulation we do to counter acceleration. You won’t feel anything.”

Richard shook his head, disappointed. He felt obscurely cheated that he would launch into space at Mach four with a cocktail in hand chatting with his co-workers. He asked, “Is there somewhere I could watch from?”

Jonathon got up, and led him up set of stairs. “There’s an observation area on level 3. We’ll hold a seat for you though,” and at Richard’s look, added, “Trust me.”

Richard found the observation room had a floor to ceiling window, it was large, covering a wedge of about a third of the level, with a bar at the back. He went over and got a beer. When the announcer called five minutes to departure, he headed for the window. The observation area was not crowded, but neither was it abandoned. 

When the cab ‘took off’ there was no discernable change to Richard’s weight. In less than a second the sky dimmed from bright blue to dark blue as a circle of ice vapor fanned out in a skirt around the cab, flashing white then gone, and over the next second deepened to black. Slowly over the next fifteen or so minutes the horizon gradually curved. 

And then there was almost nothing else happening. A bit let down, Richard went back to Jonathon and Hannelore. Jonathon looked over and took pity, “By the halfway point, you can see the Earth as a planet, Richard. We’ll go back up then. In the meantime, have another drink.”

 

When they arrived at Quito Upper, the facility looked like nothing Richard expected. He had assumed some kind of wheel. Gravity control meant that the structure simply grew in whatever direction it wished at any point in time. The cab arrived at an enclosure that looked much more like a luxury hotel lobby than part of a space station.

Jonathon, who’d been to Quito Upper before, led the other two to a restaurant he knew about. “You’re going to love this…” he started before Richard interrupted him.

“Am I smelling steaks?” he asked.

Jonathon nodded. “The best I’ve ever had.”

Richard was sniffing the air with the look of a Labrador on the verge of ecstasy. “Why bother cooking? Wouldn’t nanos do just as well?”

As they walked into the restaurant, Jonathon answered, “Nanos can make nourishing food, even good food…”

“…but it takes a human being to make great food,” a man in an apron finished from behind the counter.

Jonathon threw up three fingers, and thanked the proprietor, who was named Bob. 

Richard watched Hannelore expectantly. She looked back. After a moment, she just raised an eyebrow, “What?”

Richard shrugged, “I just expected you to protest.”

“Why on earth would I do that?”

“Well,” Richard started, “Um…usually…that is, in my experience…”

“What?” repeated Hannelore.

“Normally, someone like you, looking like you do, would point out that she was a vegetarian, even a vegan,” said Richard.

“Because…”

“Well, for one thing, you’re exceptionally slender. Young,” Richard said. “…you know what, nevermind.”

“Nope,” she smiled, “You get to own it. Why make that assumption?”

“Back when…” he started.

“See, that’s assumption one. This isn’t back when. This is now. Why assume ‘back when’?”

He nodded. “OK, got me. I am used to a lot of people with your general signifiers, making a point of not eating meat.”

“Why?”

“Why?” he repeated.

Hannelore nodded, “Why? People need protein. Meat is a first rate source.”

“Well, there’s the fact that animals die for meat, and while that never bugged me much…” he ran down as she shook her head.

“Nanos. They ‘construct’ various food products pretty much at will, which folks like Bob here turn into a great meals,” she said, “One of the few things that people DIDN’T tend to die of during the Big Collapse was hunger. There’s nothing moral about the choice to eat or not eat meat anymore, and nanos have removed any health based reasons. So whenever you feel an urge to tear into a ribeye…”

“Nanos regulate any dietary issues?” 

Jonathon nodded this time, “We keep forgetting that this is still new to you. You don’t show it much.”

Richard snorted, “I’d be a shitty intelligence officer if I wore my thoughts on my sleeve, now wouldn’t I. Mostly I nod, try to figure out what’s happening from context, and check the Interface when I have a chance.”

“So why ask now?” Hannelore asked.

Richard gave a rueful grin, “I let my guard down. And you kind of look like my first daughter, who was a committed vegan, at least until she got pregnant and her OB-Gyn read her the riot act. Come to think of it, it’s probably why I assumed that in the first place.”

Hannelore smiled and speared a chunk of sirloin, “Nope. Almost no one chooses not to eat anything that they enjoy. And if you have too much cheesecake? Or drink too much?”

“Nanos. Like with that asshat Fred and zer cyclosarin,” said Richard. 

Hannelore nodded. “They take care of a lot of things you used to have to worry about, Director.”

Richard smiled a little sadly, “And all it took was the death of over 8 out of every 10 human beings at the time.”

“Well you got to sleep through it,” said Jonathon.

“But in 2135, my grandkids and great-grandkids, and great-great-grandkids were alive. Until the Big Collapse killed eight in ten. I may have slept through it, but you two,” and he pointed at both the young people with him, “Never lost a family member you cared about. By definition your significant relatives survived the Collapse.”

Jonathon looked startled, then he nodded. “I hadn’t thought about it that way,” he admitted. “How many…” and he trailed off.

“Of my five great-grandchildren, one survived. There were three great-great grandchildren. Two of them survived, but both their parents were killed. Tailored bio-weapon,” and the shocked looks he said, “I checked public records. Of course I did.”

Jonathon nodded, “Yes. I can see that. I am sorry, for what it’s worth.”

“I grieved, Jonathon. Not much, as I never knew them, but I knew their parents…they were my beautiful grandchildren. Then I moved on. It’s the only real choice. Everyone I knew is dead.”

“Not every-,” Hannelore started, then shut up abruptly.

Richard smiled. “Not every-” and then he theatrically clapped a hand over his mouth. They he gave them both a twisted look, “So let’s go deal with whatever Beauregard T. Cornpone the Havenites have sent and come back. So I can have my wife back at least.”

 

The rest of the stay in Quito Upper was brief, but pleasant, as the three waited for the ship out to Balzac to re-provision and then head out. By early the next day, the ESS Chameleon was ready to launch on its mission. The three brought their possessions and a series of chips with their equipment needs pre-programmed into them.

As Richard crossed the docking tube he saw the ship’s name, and laughed. Hannelore looked over quizzically. He pointed at the name displayed on the nose.

“Chameleon? Really? Who thought sending a bunch of spooks on a ship named the ‘Chameleon’ was a good idea? Was the ‘ESS Batch of Tricky, Duplicitous Bastards’ unavailable for this flight?” he asked, still laughing.

But Jonathon actually nodded and said, “’Tricky Bastards’ is taking a group of trade negotiators to New Algiers. This was the best we could do.”

Richard looked over at Jonathon, who simply smiled blandly and moved on.

_Huh. I may just have underestimated him. Or I was right, and they were playing roles, having decided “Pretty Young Girl” would work better to butter me up._

The ship itself was about the size of old Twenty-First Century seagoing cruiser, about 200 meters long by 20 meters in diameter on average, and with two landers attached, based on Richards orientation as he approached the ship, dorsally and ventrally. Richard entered and along with Hannelore and Jonathon, staked out a stateroom. Nanos had affected life here as well. Richard had been expecting Spartan quarters, akin to the one time he’d been on a naval vessel. The room was well lit, with plants, and plenty of room. No bed, until Richard pressed a button, and a section of floor upon which he was standing flashed red.

When he moved, nanos rapidly constructed a bed, and at another touch, deconstructed it and replaced it with a settee, a table, and an easy chair. Then he went to find his host in the form of the ship’s commander.

Her name was Cecile Asselin and she was from Miroir. Richard greeted her and she smiled warmly. “I have heard a great deal about you, Director. May I show you my spacecraft?”

When Richard nodded, she smiled again, and led him through the ship. Almost the only non-multipurpose spaces within the hull were the engine room, the control room, and the structures for docking and entering the landing craft. Everything else was a space that served multiple purposes…whether it was configured as a dining facility, a gymnasium, a lounge, a lab, or a meeting room…each space was programmed and the facility constructed by nanos on the spot.

Finally Richard could no longer contain himself. He looked at Mission Commander Asselin and asked, “Why so many variable use rooms?”

She answered, “You see the size of your staterooms, no? If we could not change the use of spaces at the touch of a button, do you think your stateroom would be so large? No. For crew morale, and because there is no useful reason to be miserable, we make our private spaces as large as possible by making our common spaces as multi-purpose as possible.”

It made sense. Richard was still absorbing the impacts that nanos had had on society. When he said as much to Mission Commander Asselin, she laughed and said, “Not so great a set of changes as the Flicker Drive will produce, I suspect.”

Richard nodded, “About that. All I know is that we can travel faster than light, how does that work?”

Asselin shook her head, “We never ‘travel’ faster than typical orbital velocities. But we have a pseudo-velocity many times the speed of light…roughly 360 times in fact. Would you care to watch and learn, from the control room?”

As they traveled to the control room, Cecile educated Richard on the Flicker Drive, and how it was discovered. 

As she explained, Richard began to suspect that Cecile might well be right about the relative levels of revolution brought by nanos vs the Flicker Drive and its associated technologies such as paired message satellites. 

The Flicker Drive had been discovered when practical physicists and engineers working with gravity induction plates and quantum computers noticed statistically significant performance differentials between the computers operating on spacecraft headed towards a research station near the Dwarf Planet Pluto and orbital installations at L4 and L5.

Over time Earth scientists had learned that the quantum tunneling effect upon which the quantum computers’ processing speed depended was affected by curvature of local space time. And while they dug into that, they figured out how to use the quantum tunneling effect to move more than information. Then they learned that the farther from gravity sources the greater the distance they could tunnel items.

Putting the two together had led to the breakthrough. Each single flicker might start at an effective 1 meter per second close to something like Earth, but would ramp up as the ship passed through the decreasing gravitation curve. A bit outside the orbit of Neptune, the sun’s gravity was low enough that the distance of an individual flicker coupled with flicker rates per second created a “velocity” higher than the speed of light at a just a bit under 300,000 km per second. By the time you reached the Heliopause, the velocity translated to a bit over one light year per day, and topped out there because interstellar space was a mass of competing stellar gravitational impulses.

Within 4 hours the ship they were on would reach transluminal velocities, and within a half day they would reach “cruising velocity”. The trip to Balzac, aka Sigma Draconis b, would take about 19 days.

When they reached the control room, Richard stood at the back while Mission Commander Asselin began the process of undocking and launching the Chameleon. The spacecraft moved away from the station using old fashioned chemical reaction thrusters and then an Orbital Maneuvering System engine fired briefly to kick the Chameleon far enough off to commence Flicker Drive operations. At first the flickers barely moved the ship. An outside observer, on the station for example, would perceive the ship literally flickering as each cycle moved it barely more than a meter. 

But soon, the distance each tunnel produced grew, exponentially. As they did, the Chameleon picked up “speed” and was soon past the orbit of the Moon, and headed for the orbit of Mars. Richard was watching, when suddenly he had an ugly thought.

“What about the Asteroid Belt,” he called suddenly.

There were a couple of muffled snickers and Cecile gave him a bit of a look, and said, “Richard. The average distance between asteroids is a million kilometers, and the vast majority of asteroids are less than a kilometer across, at their widest points. You’re in more danger of a collision with either body flying between the Earth and the Moon than flying through the Asteroid Belt.”

Richard blushed, but held his tongue for the rest of the time as he watched the crew of the Chameleon go about their business. By the time they’d crossed Jupiter’s orbit, there were only a few crewmembers in the Control room, and Cecile was showing Richard the controls of the view screen, and various special Universal Interface displays she gave to Klaatu.

So Richard spent the better part of the next several hours playing with the display on Klaatu, showing the Chameleon’s progress, the location of other “nearby” craft, and the planets, until Cecile informed him that they were reaching the orbit of Neptune and that they were about to move faster than light. Richard was expecting no visible transition, but this time, there was an observable effect. The display screen, at that point showing the sun, began showing weird flickering effects. Richard gave Cecile a questioning look.

She smiled again, and said, “Oui. The computer that corrects for our images being captured at each flicker can mostly keep up with variable jumps being ‘faster than light’. But the image processor still can’t quite smooth out the effects of conflicting nano-scale changes in gravitational fields. So you get slight blue- or redshifted, at random, imagery.”

Richard nodded, vaguely gratified that there was at least one thing that the Twenty-Fifth Century hadn’t managed to smooth out into imperceptibility. When you were traveling faster than light, but not so fast that the stars went whizzing past the windows, something visible should happen at least.

But basically, Richard was coming to terms with something both mundane and terribly profound. Space was huge. The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, was four days away. The starscape around them changed more slowly than a coastline would while canoeing. He was traveling faster than he could have possibly dreamed, and going places literally unimaginably far away, and it was almost impossible to distinguish from being stuck in his house during a storm.

He was, nevertheless, going not just to another planet, but one orbiting a foreign star.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Laying down a lot more exposition here. Let me know if it's annoying, obtrusive or possibly just right.
> 
> I do have a list (growing) of the planets that exist, and where they are. At first I thought, "Hey, use the exoplanets we've already discovered,' but there's a problem with that. Most exoplanets are a) REALLY big (even if rocky rather than a gas giant they tend to be on the "three times Earth mass" list) so that we can discern their gravitational effects on their stars, which are b) small, usually M-type Red Dwarfs because see the prior point. Endlessly describing plonking along with two more of you on your back in the dim red light of a tiny little star, likely with huge days and short years? Over and over again? No thanks. AND most of them are more than several hundred light years away.
> 
> So I started looking at lists of stars in the F, G, and K ranges within about 60 light years of Earth. There are a number I've already decided on, plus another, multiply colonized planet orbiting Alpha Centauri A/B that will be the setting for Act II. The planets are:  
> Earth: Sol (G2) c (duh.)  
> Haven: Tau Ceti (G8) e  
> Miroir: Epsilon Eridani (K2) a  
> Balzac : Sigma Draconis (aka Alsafi) (K0) b  
> New Algiers (the independent planet): Alpha Canis Majoris (aka Procyon) A/B (F5/White Dwarf) e (it's BRIGHT on New Algiers)  
> New Avalon: Epsilon Indi (K4) b  
> As yet unnamed AIL affiliate: Eta Cassiopeiae A/B (G0/K7) c  
> As yet unnamed AIL affiliate: Gliese 570 A/B/C (K4/M1/M3) a (on that planet the night is NOT dark and full of terrors...mainly it's full of red light)
> 
> I had Richard make an ass of himself about the asteroid belt SPECIFICALLY as a take that to George Lucas and many others with their whooshing, swooping asteroids.
> 
> Anyway, even more of "How Stuff Works". Next up, "How the society works".


	5. Chapter 4

They were halfway to Balzac when Hannelore and Jonathon came to get Richard. He had been having a meal with Cecile, Mission Commander Asselin, when they came in with serious looks on their faces. Hannelore began, “We’ve just received a communique from our representative on Balzac. The Havenites have made their move to try and promote the Naturalists to the Chairmanship.”

Richard swore, “Are we already screwed, or should we continue?”

“That’s an excellent question. The AIL Representative, Samuel Johnson, messaged us that he is trying desperately to delay action. The good news is that Balzac’s government, governed as it is by literary movements? Even more prone to delay than most, and that’s before the Romantics get in on the act with all their drama,” answered Jonathon.

Richard nodded, “So we continue on…hey wait a second,” he started.

Cecile interrupted, by now thoroughly familiar with explaining Twenty Fifth Century tech to Richard, “Message satellites use the tunnel effect to pass information between them. We can talk between star systems now with less communications delay than the first expedition to Mars experienced in your day.”

Richard nodded, by now unembarrassed. He and the Mission Commander had formed a good working relationship, as the commander of the spacecraft and the officer in charge of why the spacecraft was going anywhere in the first place, and she had taken it on herself to inform him as needed about any technological changes he was unaware of.

Then he had another thought. “Could they have known we were coming? Is that why this is happening?”

Hannelore shook her head. “We would have detected it if the Havenites tried to plant someone on Earth because you can’t really sneak someone into the CentGov system. And even if you could, CentGov controls all access to the FTL communications satellites, so it’s not like you could send a secret message in the impossible event that you did sneak in.”

“What about intercepting a signal?” Richard persisted.

Cecile answered that one, “Not possible. Each receiver is unique, and the transmitters must tunnel the information directly to that unique receiver. For the purposes of any given message, they are uniquely paired, although not permanently.”

“So what we have here is the NSA’s wet dream; a completely secure, flexible, and unique messaging system,” said Richard.

“I suppose so,” said Jonathon

“OK then. So it was just random bad luck, which is always a factor, and now it’s a race, and they got a jump on us, but we’re not out of the game, and it’s possible that they aren’t looking for us to be anything more than…what was our cover story again?”

“Literary critics.”

Richard laughed. 

“Don’t,” said Hannelore. “That will get us more open doors than Ambassador Johnson could ever manage.”

“I’m not laughing at the concept,” Richard said. “It’s just comically close to ‘Cultural Attaché’, which The Company, ahhh, the CIA, used for an official cover so much it became a damn cliché.”

“So to run down,” he went on, “We arrive, settle in at the Embassy, and then we begin meeting Romantic, Realist, and Naturalist ‘leaders’ and evaluate our Havenite opposition, who probably have no reason to suspect that we’re anything other than what we seem to be,” Richard finished.

“That’s about the size of it,” said Jonathon.

“Since we just got this bit of bad news, I’m guessing we can actually start putting faces and names on the opposition, yes?” said Richard.

Hannelore gestured, and a conference table chairs, and a virtual screen appeared. “As it happens, yes. This is the leader of the Havenite Delegation, Harrison Lawrence…”

Richard interrupted, “Jesus. He even looks like a Beauregard T. Cornpone!”

Jonathon looked up from what he was reviewing, and said, “Don’t underestimate him. He was the Havenite we think was instrumental in bringing Avalon into the Havenite orbit. And the Avalonians are so unremittingly warlike and hostile we can’t even get within several AUs of their planet.”

“So he’s a guy who looks like a beefwit, but is devastatingly effective. Good cover if you can manage it. Still better to look boring,” Richard said.

Hannelore and Cecile raised eyebrows as Richard. He pointed at himself, “This is actually not a good look for an intelligence officer. What you want, mainly, is forgettable. But that only goes so far. By the time you’ve spent any time in country, the CCTVs and minders had usually picked you out of a crowd, even if you looked completely nondescript. There’s an upper limit.”

“So you’d like us to have your nanos make you look boring?” Cecile said, a smile playing over her lips.

Richard shook his head, “In this day and age, looking like an action movie star counts as nondescript. If I looked like Walter Mitty…THAT would stand out.”

Hannelore clicked a display, “This is Hortensia Schiller. She’s the current Byron of the Romantics,” and she nodded, “Yes. They did, in fact, name the position of leader of their particular movement after Lord Byron.”

Hortensia, in her official portrait, was all languid arms and draped over a fainting couch, wearing a short-waisted gown. There was another of her at a desk. She was still wearing something that wouldn’t have been out a place in a period drama…except for the holographic display she was gesturing at…and her expression which had gone from more than faintly dissipated to extraordinarily sharp and acute.

“She might be counted on as the most reliable of the three, owning to the great animosity between Romantic and Naturalist philosophy. But my money is on Samuel Bennet, the Current Chair and the Head of the Realists. You two are going to get along like a house on fire. He’s way too cynical to be a good target for the Havenites,” she said as she clicked to a picture of a man in a linen waistcoat, with a long handlebar mustache.

“Finally,” she said, as she clicked to a jovial bald man with a clipped, neat beard, “Paul Raquin, the Zola of the Naturalists. He’ll be trouble. Strong Social Darwinist, more so than many Naturalists, we already have some footage of him greeting Harrison Lawrence quite effusively. That is going to be our problem.”

“How is the government structured?” asked Richard. “What are the pinch points, how much is official vs informal?”

“What do you mean?” asked Jonathon.

“Well, back when I was running the Russia and Near East section, the Russian Federation was run by one guy, the President. Basically he was a dictator in all but name…but one guy can’t run everything. So he had a Cabinet. But behind that Cabinet was his State Council and Security Council. Those two groups really ran everything, working in the background. Cabinet Meetings were just the stamp on decisions that had already been made.”

Jonathon nodded, “I see. What they have on Balzac is not entirely dissimilar. There is an official chairmanship, literally called the Chair, and an advisory council. Power is shared between the three factions, based on a standard of ‘artistic merit’ that is not unlike, but still different than a majority vote.”

Richard interrupted, “How so?”

Jonathon replied, “While ‘popularity’ figures in, there is a ‘critical’ component...literally. Critics, literary analysts and acclaimed writers can greatly impact the ultimate results. The most popular faction may not actually prevail, depending on critical consensus about the latest works from the leading lights of each movement.”

“I’m starting to see why Dean called them political parties inside an ‘Or what’ casing. So what position will we have as outside literary critics?” asked Richard.

“That’s the interesting bit and why the group team from the Undaunted recommended our cover. While we don’t have the kind of political power that critics on Balzac have directly, the status that critics from Old Earth possess will give us a certain degree of referential authority.”

“OK, so we throw some weight but indirectly. What are the major issues?”

“Some of them are the usual things that a government deals with; policing, health care, infrastructure coordination, and simply doing what’s needed to maintain a government. But also, certifying publishing of literary merit. Conducting symposia. Regulating publishing in general. Validating criticism.”

“So what you’re saying is that I’m going to have to really start studying 19th Century Lit in order to keep my cover intact?” observed Richard. 

Hannelore nodded, “We can keep a link to the databases on the ship rather than the ones on Balzac so there aren’t records of us consulting about things we ought to just know, but the links aren’t voice activated and constantly hesitating to consult your interface will become obvious.”

“Looks like I have a LOT of homework,” Richard sighed.

 

Almost two weeks later, they we closing in on Sigma Draconis, and Richard had spent a great deal of time with Klaatu reading curated pieces from 19th Century Lit…from the Romantics, such as Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein with the wild excess and explicit rejection of the traditional, and the Naturalists such as Émile Zola’s L'Assommoir, a meditation on the intrinsic failings of the lower classes. Richard was somewhat annoyed to find that Jack London was a Naturalist, as that contradicted his rather simplistic initial notion of ‘Naturalist’ equals ‘Bad’, morally if not literarily. 

Klaatu showed excerpts of several novels to Richard from the naturalist movement that he’d previously enjoyed, such as London and Stephen Crane. But on further reflection Richard had to agree that they were in fact examples of the “nature is uncompromising, harsh, and determinative” philosophy that characterized the Naturalists.

The Realists contained a long list of authors Richard had read and enjoyed, including Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Henrik Ibsen. As well as the author for whom the planet was named, Henri Balzac. But he tried hard as he read up to divorce his affinity for Realism, his eyerolls at Romanticism, and his native antipathy towards the deterministic nature of Naturalism into a willingness to hear from all sides. He had to seek, as Dean had instructed before he left, any result…including the Naturalists on top…so long as the Havenites were cut off from any access to the planet.

In the end, as they approached the planet, they began receiving invitations from the three major factions to meet, and discuss works currently in circulation. The Chameleon settled into orbit around Balzac. The gravity on the planet was a bit lighter than Earth, as Sigma Draconis b, aka Balzac, was mineral poor, while being approximately the same diameter as Earth with a rotational period of a bit over 25 hours. Which was close enough to Earth that the inhabitants simply slept a bit longer every day.

Richard and his group joined Cecile in the control room for orbital insertion. It was one of the few times, thus far, he really understood the mechanism; CentGov/AIL spacecraft actually did have rather large and efficient rocket motors onboard…because Flicker Drive velocity did not affect 'Newtonian' momentum in the slightest. As a result, while Balzac’s lower mass resulted in a lesser orbital velocity, the Chameleon had retained Earth orbital velocity at geosynchronous orbit. It now needed to speed up to a velocity almost twice as fast in order to take up a 110 mile orbit around Balzac.

There was no sensation of acceleration, but Richard was mildly gratified to feel a rumble of vibration as the Chameleon’s reaction motors fired. When they shut off, the pilot reported, “Orbital velocity, commander,” and Cecile nodded. Balzac was not that different than Earth, especially from this distance, where the difference in land mass shapes and size wasn’t terribly obvious.

When the pilot made his announcement, Cecile turned to Richard and his team, “We are now at your disposal, Director. I will remain aboard, with my crew, but there will always be a lander here, with crew aboard, ready for immediate use. Use the A lander for your trip to the surface if you please.”

Richard nodded, and shook Cecile’s hand and smiled warmly, “I hope to see you again, and soon.”

“But not without a success to report,” added Jonathon.

 

The flight to the surface was everything Richard had missed, thus far, about space travel and was even better than his imagination. In the Twenty First century spacecraft windows had been weak points to be minimized. Chameleon A’s windows were large, and while there was no sensation of acceleration, there was the horizon rolling and dipping, and then the craft was entering the atmosphere which flared with heat has the lander tore through it.

After a while, the nanos constructed at first stubby, then more graceful, wings, as the lander shed velocity. Then, much as any aircraft, it flared out and landed at the air/spaceport outside Balzac City. When Richard and his small team stepped out onto the new planet, he took a deep breath. While the air carried subtle hints of unknown odors, it was very much breathable, and seemingly normal.

As he stepped down, a tall man, in a tan suit of an anachronistic cut came up and shook his hand. “Samuel Bennet, Chair of Balzac, at your service sir.”

Richard nodded, “Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I very much look forward to our time here on your planet, and I hope that we can find time not just to discuss matters of governmental, but of literary import.”

Bennet smiled widely at that, and said, “I am sure that we will find time to discuss all that and more, Mr. Jensen. But come, let us get out of the hot noonday sun.”

Sigma Draconis looked more orange, but maybe a tad larger than the sun, and was still quite warm, so Richard, Hannelore, and Jonathon made their way into a large open structure, air curtained off, and cool. Samuel Johnson was waiting for them there. He was lean and muscular, and looked so much like the popular image of an astronaut that Richard IDed him immediately.

“Ambassador Johnson, a pleasure to see you. I hope being detached from your duties on the Undaunted was not too inconvenient?” Richard said.

Johnson smiled, and gave a most informal, “Nope. I joined to go to new worlds and meet interesting people, and, well…” he waved around himself. “Just look at me, now.”

“Indeed,” said Bennet, “We have been most pleased to discuss some matters with Mr. Johnson, but of course the more…unique…aspects of our culture must perforce elude him.”

Johnson gave an apologetic grin, “I’m an astronaut, and well versed in a number of subjects, but unfortunately the Undaunted’s library was lacking a deep bench for Nineteenth Century literature. I’m glad you were able to come on such short notice, Mr. Jensen.”

Richard smiled, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Ambassador. I am deeply invested in understanding this wonderful new world that Balzac offers.”

Bennet then cleared his throat, “If you would please, we have a vehicle waiting to take you to your embassy.”

Richard nodded, and the small group made their way to an electric limousine that took them through the streets of Balzac City to a large compound on the outskirts of town. It looked quite like many of the embassies that Richard had been stationed at over his long career.

_Nanos, again. Pick a spot, program it in, and stand back._

When Chairman Bennet made his excuses, and departed, Richard and his small team entered the building with Johnson who introduced them to the other four members of the Undaunted’s leave behind team; Charlotte Briggs, the team doctor; Michal Durand, computers and communications; Asafa Dmisa, security; and Frederica Sugawara, also security.

Richard looked around and pulled out a nano controller, and constructed the first of his specialty items, a signal scanner. Then he swept the main rooms, and satisfied turned to the small group. He pointed at himself and then his team as he introduced everyone, then cut to the chase, “I’m your local spook. This is my team and while I hope to not interfere with your activities, I have a rather large remit to stop the Havenites in general, and Harrison Lawrence in particular,” he turned to Michal Durand and asked them, “Dare I hope you have a skiff here?”

Durand cocked their head to the side and replied, “Perhaps my English translator is not as good as I thought…why do you need a small boat?”

Richard laughed, “No. A Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility…ess, see, eye, eff. ‘Skiff’. I can’t constantly have to sweep rooms, but if we can get an inside room, preferably vibration isolated from the rest of the building, we can operate in there while maintaining cover out here.”

Ms. Sugawara, a rather tall muscular woman, nodded, and led Richard to an interior room. She clearly called up her interface, then made a series of gestures. The room inside the door shrank slightly, and one door disappeared entirely. What was left was a large empty room, into which Ms. Sugawara gestured.

Richard, Jonathon, and Hannelore entered and began using their own nano programming to produce equipment…isolated computer systems, safes, desks, racks of potential equipment, including bugs, shotgun mikes, and so forth. Richard smiled up at their host, “Thanks Frederica.”

She smiled, “Call me Fred.”

Richard shuddered as Jonathon and Hannelore burst into laughter.

Fred frowned, “What?”

Hannelore, continuing to giggle waved her hand, “Don’t mind him. You just gave the poor man a flashback.”

“It wasn’t funny,” Richard growled.

“Oh it was funny,” Jonathon countered, “It just wasn’t funny for YOU.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a longer than usual break....I plead that I got to a section where I needed some notes from a friend who also HAPPENS to be a Professor of Modern English Lit about the society on Balzac. He's still in the process of reading and giving me notes, so there will be additional material changes but based on my wife's and his notes, there's been some additional material added in Chapter One. This is going to be a living document based on feedback. 
> 
> The good news is that my plotting is bearing fruit. Let's see if I can keep it up. If so, I'll have leveled up yet again, author-wise.
> 
> Also, I've figured out the rest of the mentioned planets at this point: Prime in orbit around Alpha Centauri A, the c planet but there's only one more planet past that because much past that distance (1/5 of the distance between binary stars, in this case 11 to 39 AU for B around A, or 2.5 AU) the orbits become unstable. I imagine that the seasons on Prime are based more on the position of Alpha Centauri B (it tends to range between "Saturn" and "Neptune" about A) and the planet than axial tilt.
> 
> Data Here: <http://www.solstation.com/stars/alp-cent3.htm>
> 
> Anyways, the planets are Prime around Alpha Centauri...multiple governments.
> 
> Then Pan Africa: Eta Cassiopeiae A/B (G0/K7) c and  
> Atarashī Nihon: Gliese 570 A/B/C (K4/M1/M3) a (it's now the Land of the Rising, and Rising, and then Rising Sun)
> 
> Also, seriously, notes on stuff that works, stuff that doesn't pacing/plotting issues. Things you're confused about. I want it all.


	6. Chapter 5

The next day, Richard and his team found themselves on their way to a salon. Basically a ‘salon’, like its Eighteen and Nineteenth Century forbearers, was a mix between a cocktail party and an artistic and literary performance. This was, however, rather more than the usual salon, as the three faction leaders would be attending. In addition, the Havenite delegation would be attending, which would give Richard his first up close look at the opposition. As well as his first chance to actually interact with them. 

On consultation with the Ambassador, they decided to wear dress clothes in the Earth style rather than the, to their eyes, anachronistic Nineteenth Century inspired dress their hosts were wearing. According to Johnson, “They know where you’re from, I’ve never had trouble anywhere I’ve gone dressed as an Earthman, and frankly there may some cachet to showing up not looking like everyone else.”

“We’ll be easier to pick out of a crowd, but we do have official covers, so why not?” Richard had replied.

So they all attended wearing the fairly utilitarian and reasonably unisex clothing that had been in fashion on Earth, in one form or another for some time. Earth’s egalitarianism and large population had led to a tendency towards dress that was on the practical rather than ornamental side. After weeks on Earth interacting with the people there, Richard also suspected that there was a leveling effect on the part of nano-programmed body modification at work. If everyone was gorgeous, there wasn’t much point in ornamental clothing.

That wasn’t true about bodies themselves, though. Eye colors, hair color, face shapes, and so on and so forth, showed all the variety that the clothing didn’t. Hannelore had chosen a shocking mop of electric blue hair to go with large luminous deep violet eyes. And Jonathon had decided on a mullet, of all things, of hot pink hair, with green eyes and a sharply pointed chin. Richard continued with the sandy blond hair and glacier blue (but not unnatural) eye color he’d woken up with.

While he appreciated Hannelore and Jonathon’s decision to, in Hannelore’s words, “Earth it all up in here,” he wasn’t used to thinking of his nose shape and eye color and cheekbones being a matter of fashion.

_You can take the boy out of the Twenty First Century, but you can’t take the Twenty First Century out of the boy._

He wondered how Laura would feel about Earth fashion. She’d always been proud of her eyes, which were objectively gorgeous to begin with, and he wondered whether she’d be happy or outraged that anyone could have her best feature for the asking. Given how many comments she’d made about both of their weights and her height, she probably wouldn’t even notice the eyes on her way to making herself 5’6” and 120 pounds.

He looked around the large but comfortable conference room. It looked just like a large ballroom, or perhaps a sitting room, in a mansion from the Nineteenth century. There were a large number of people chatting, sipping drinks, and socializing.

Unfortunately, based on photos, Harrison and Havenites in general wore similar clothing to people on Balzac, which meant that Richard was at a disadvantage in identifying the opposition. So as he sipped a first rate scotch produced from some nano programming provided to Chairman Bennet by the crew of the Undaunted, the first indication he had of trouble was a voice in his ear. 

“I do declare that I have rarely been so well received in all my travels,” said a woman directly into his left ear.

Richard suppressed a jump. The woman’s voice was heavily accented, almost a caricature of a Southern United States accent. He turned and saw the speaker, an attractive blonde woman, in a tightly corseted robin’s egg blue gown that was fluffed and petticoated, unlike, as it turned out, many of the women attending the salon, most of whom were wearing high-waisted and far less voluminous dresses.

She was smiling, smirking even, and then bit her lip and looked up at him from under her eyelashes. “Are you the famous Mr. Jensen of Earth, renowned authority on our hosts’ chosen métier?”

“If you mean, am I a literary critic versed in Nineteenth Century Earth Literature? Then, yes. The things I hope to learn… I’ve read the works of Twain, and Shelley, London, Taine, and Zola,” Richard gestured around the room, “But these remarkable and delightful people live them.”

“Why, you yourself have the soul of a poet, Mr. Jensen,” the woman said, giggling.

“I’m afraid you have the advantage of me, madam,” Richard replied.

The lady extended her hand, limp wristed and palm down, and Richard took it in his with a small shake then released her as she said, “I am Miss Felicity Lawrence.”

Richard ran a puzzled look across his face, briefly, quite deliberately, and then allowed it to smooth out as he said, “Ah. You are related to the gentleman from Haven, Harrison Lawrence. His wife?” Richard said, then before Felicity could correct him, said as if to himself, “No. Historically, ‘miss’ was a title for unmarried women. His sister, perhaps? Or niece.”

Felicity smiled warmly at him, and took a step closer, “You flatter me, sir. ‘His niece,’ indeed. No, sir. His sister. You are quite correct, Mr. Jensen. On Haven we have retained far more of the old, good ways. None of this barbaric ‘mizzzzz’ nonsense,” Felicity drew the relationship status agnostic title out contemptuously, “No. Far better to declare your allegiance from the beginning.”

Richard’s eyebrow arched, “Quite. In point of fact, I understand from my briefings before we left for Balzac that women taking their honorifics based on their marriage status isn’t the only ‘good, old’ way you Havenites have kept.” He allowed her to hear the quote marks.

She smiled a trifle uncertainly. “Why, no. I take it you refer to our relationship to the Negro on our planet?” At his nod, she continued, “I must confess, when first we began traveling among the stars, I was distressed to find that our ancestors may have…shaded…some truths from us. My brother was particularly put out, I must say.”

Then she looked up at him from under her eyelashes, “But surely you must understand, the Negro on Haven is truly the lesser, with the full effect of the Mark of Cain on him. Or her,” she said, as Richard opened his mouth then shut it. She went on, “We could no more lay down the burden of guiding the poor souls than a parent could lay down the burden of rearing a child.”

_Jesus. It’s like seeing some letter from John C. Calhoun come to life right in front of me. But careful! No reason to directly and thoroughly antagonize the Havenites yet. ___

____

____

At that moment a baritone voice, orotund and dripping with the same ‘Southern’ tones as Felicity’s, came over his shoulder, “Now Felicity, you know that our ways are not always appreciated here among the stars, and definitely not with Earthmen,” and as Richard turned, the man he guessed was Harrison Lawrence raised both hands placatingly, “Or women, of course. I know you of Earth are tetchy about that,” and then Harrison smiled, winningly.

Richard nodded his head slightly, to acknowledge the intervention.

_I’m going to have to start thinking of it as a Haven accent. I’m not sure the Southern accent survived the last 400 years, and if it did I never heard it in CentGov complexes. But this might as well be genteel Alabama for what it is._

Richard nodded his head slightly as he turned to address Harrison. “Mr. Lawrence I presume?”

Lawrence nodded his own, as if to acknowledge a shared bond. Which made Richard shudder internally at the presumption that he had anything in common with the people of Haven. He kept that feeling off his face, however, as he had long ago determined that his first encounter with Harrison Lawrence of Haven would be dedicated to figuring out if outright defection was a possibility. 

Certainly, what his sister had implied was potentially promising. Lawrence could have been ‘put out’, so to speak, by either the customs of the planets he dealt with, or by how different Haven’s treatment of ethnic groups was from the vast majority of human societies. Time to find out if outrage or shame was the origin of Lawrence’s attitude.

“You would presume correctly sir. And I have the honor of addressing Richard Jensen, scholar of Nineteenth Century Literature, and of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in particular?”

Richard nodded, glad he’d picked a cover “specialty” with which he was at least more than passingly familiar, and which would give him a chance to spar with Havenites.

“I see you know your Twain, sir.”

“Why ever would I not? One of the great Southern authors. Did you know that Mr. Clemens was even in the Confederate Army, sir?”

Richard smiled, “Yes. For two weeks, before he quit in disgust over a killing of a man who may or may not have been a soldier, for the signal sin of ‘not being from around here’. He thereby avoided a meeting with Ulysses Grant by leaving and heading west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed the Secretary to the United States Governor of the Nevada Territory. Hardly a ‘Lost Cause’ Firebrand.”

“A what?” Lawrence replied.

“A ‘Lost Causer’. Someone who romanticized the Southern Confederacy after it had lost the war,” Jenkins replied.

“But it didn’t,” Lawrence answered.

Jenkins gave his adversary a look, and said, “How so? The records are extremely clear on who gave up his sword at Appomattox Courthouse.”

Lawrence smiled, “Ahhh. But our records show that the Civil War never ended. We persisted in a thousand ways, large and small, and in the end we won. We took our property and we left Earth, for Tau Ceti and our proper home.”

“But look around,” Richard replied, “Yes, you yourselves on Haven have managed to perpetuate a certain…resentment…over not being allowed to own other men, but even your staunch allies on Avalon do not own slaves. They may all be pasty white Central England Englishmen with a nasty colonialist mindset, and I concede, a penchant for belligerence. But every other planet that we have between us contacted: Miroir, Prime, Pan Africa, Atarashī Nihon, and New Algiers do not have slavery. Do you think maybe they know something you don’t, Mr. Lawrence?” Richard asked.

“I believe that perhaps they have forgotten an essential truth Mr. Jensen. That men are not equal, and never will be.”

Richard nodded, “Perhaps. But I think you missed something there. Maybe all men and women aren’t equal, but nothing in the color of their skin or their sex is in any way determines their worth.”

Richard pointed out Hannelore and Jonathon. “How do you even know how they were born? She could have been black and a man, and he could have been a woman. Does their current status in any way reflect their worth?”

Lawrence shook his head, “We know how they were born. They are from Earth. An Earth that has encouraged miscegenation for centuries. They were Mulatto. No matter what nanos do for them, their mongrelization is exactly what we of Haven left to avoid.”

Richard’s spirits sank. Harrison Lawrence was perfect. A perfect, all-around thoroughgoing racist bastard, but he was a perfect exemplar of the type. They’d existed back in the old Twenty First Century, but were being slowly squeezed out as each generation of bigots lost a few offspring, and never really managed to make up the loss with recruitment…so to speak.

On Haven there was no loss, because there was no larger, disapproving society. And now the whole sorry exercise was beginning again. It would go on and on, and Haven would lose people to the larger interstellar society. But it would take a long time. During which Richard, and if was very good, and a little lucky, Laura, would have to live with them.

While Harrison Lawrence’s attitude was grinding the realization of just how difficult Richard’s task really was in his face, Hortensia Schiller, the Byron, swept up. Giving Lawrence a dire look she then took Richard’s arm, and dragged him away with a glad cry. Richard gave Lawrence an apologetic look, while murmuring, lips motionless, “Thanks you for rescuing me, Byron Schiller.”

Hortensia laughed, a long silvery peal, and said, “My darling, you looked positively stifled. The least I could do would be to sweep in and rescue you from that drab. His airhead of a sister is bad enough…she’s merely foolish,” and here Hortensia’s voice dropped to a hiss, “He is an utter asshole!”

Richard chuckled. He waved down a barman and ordered another single malt. “On that, Hortensia, we find ourselves in complete agreement.”

She smiled warmly, touching his arm, “And in many other things, even if you seem more of a Realist. Twain and all.”

He smiled back, “True, but I also am and always was a science fiction fan, and your name sake was present at the creation of…”

She clapped her hands excitedly, “‘Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.’ Yes! So you are not averse to the more mythic after all.”

He shook his head no, “I may find the verite of Twain, or Steinbeck, more meritorious, but I assure you the lure of a Burroughs, or a Verne is not lost upon me.” 

She made a small moue of distaste, “How can you say that? Merely because they engaged in flights of fancy, you think them lesser.”

He cocked his head to the side, “But surely madam, without the constraint of the real, literature can do what it will, without regard to strict constraints of reality. And how can you discover truths when there is no constraint?”

At this point Bennet came up, interested in the byplay. His eyes twinkling, he glanced at Richard, “This is an old point between us, my friend,” and he turned to Hortensia, “If you would allow me, I will see if I can paraphrase your thesis adequately…”

Then he turned to Richard, “By shuffling off lesser constraints we find ourselves able to explore deeper, more important truths, about emotion, and feeling. What is important in life.”

Richard sipped his scotch as Hortensia smiled affectionately at Bennet. “You do listen Samuel.”

He laughed, “I never said I didn’t, that was always your accusation my dear.”

Richard added, “You both miss what I think is the most important aspect.”

Hortensia and Samuel turned, both of them clearly enjoying the three way verbal jousting.

_I think they need the stimulation. I can see that a bit of sparring is the thing that gets them going most of all…_

Richard smiled, “I know that your founders minimized post Nineteenth Century works, but I am a science fiction fan as well as a literary scholar. SF…,” and at their puzzled looks, added, “Science Fiction. SF?”

Both of them nodded, understanding, and he went on, “SF frequently was able to discuss things that were hard to reify or to discuss in polite company by taking the familiar from them. To point out one way it did that from the very beginning,” and Richard gestured at the Havenites chatting with the Zola, “Racism might be hard to discuss because ‘everyone knows’ that a group is inferior. But let the group be aliens, or even better humans in an alien empire, and be the despised lesser? Then people begin to think.”

“By removing the realistic, you allow it to be more real?” Hortensia observed.

Richard nodded. 

Bennet laughed, “But then don’t you make it just another form of realism?”

Richard grinned, “Well, there you have it. There were divisions in that literature as with any other. You could have strictly realistic, for certain values of the term, science fiction, like Arthur Clarke or Neal Stephenson, and they could share the same exact space with Harlan Ellison or Ursula Le Guin. ‘Rendezvous With Rama’ and ‘And I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream’ both speak to the human condition. And while one is more ‘Realism’, and one much more ‘Romantic’, they both have merit.”

Schiller and Bennet both looked at him, and then Hortensia said, “I am so very happy that your planet, and the AIL, saw fit to send you Richard. It speaks well of Earth, and ill of…other places…regarding who they chose to send.”

Bennet nodded.

Richard smiled and said, quietly, “I am here to share culture from later in history that your founders may have deliberately suppressed,” and he raised a hand at their looks, “Subject to your self-determination, surely.” Then he went on, “But I would be a gross liar if I didn’t admit that part of my mission is to ensure that Balzac doesn’t fall under the sway of Haven.”

“And does fall under the sway of AIL?” Schiller asked shrewdly, all flirty pretense abandoned.

_And how often does the truth actually set me free? But when it does…_

“No.” At their looks Richard went on, “I am only to help you decide to avoid alliance with Haven. Ask the people on New Algiers. When they get done negotiating trade as an independent planet with the AIL.”

Hortensia replied coolly, “We only have your word for that.”

Richard thought for a moment, “We could put you in contact with people on New Algiers, but you might simply assume we had mocked that up. I’ll ask about someone bringing a delegation from Balzac to New Algiers. Presumably you’d believe your own people about what’s going on?”

Bennet looked over at Hortensia, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

Jensen smiled and called out, “Klaatu Barada Nikto,” and at their looks, went on, “Interface.”

Then he wrote a message for Cecile to signal Earth to route a ship out to Balzac to pick up passengers for New Algiers. Within moments he received an acknowledgement, and he gave his hosts a smile. “Not all set, but we’re working on making arrangements.”

At that point the small group was joined by the final ‘faction’ leader, Paul Raquin. He smiled, eyes twinkling, “What kind of arrangements?”

Bennet turned, saying, “Arrangements to see how the AIL treats planets that do not join either themselves or the Haven Alliance.”

Raquin nodded, “So? Interesting. I do hope that the leaders of the two other main literary movements on Balzac were not planning on leaving the Naturalists out.”

Bennet quickly said, “We’d never dream of excluding you, Paul. We were literally just making the arrangements.”

“I believe you mean figuratively,” Raquin began, when Richard interrupted.

“Your pardon, but they really were in the process of starting to make arrangements. I have just transmitted the request. It truly was ‘literally’ just now. Richard Jensen, Earth.”

“Ah yes, my friend from Haven, Harrison, mentioned you,” Raquin said, shaking Richard’s hand.

“I hope nothing bad. Or maybe I do,” Richard said, and sipped his single malt with what could only be described as an arch look.

Raquin laughed, “Well, he did say that you were a Twain scholar, and thus rather not inclined to our philosophy.”

“I will admit my natural cynicism plays well in examining Twain’s oeuvre. Anyone who can write ‘Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven’ in the midst of the Third Great Awakening…albeit publishing when it was thoroughly waning…has my admiration.”

Raquin nodded, “Yet you mock our points regarding the nature of a man?”

Richard pointed at Hortensia, “I can keep an open mind regarding Romanticism despite reading, and greatly enjoying, ‘The Literary Crimes of Fenimore Cooper’. I find merit in most works. I just have an affinity for the cynical old bastard.”

Raquin nodded, his mouth smiling. The smile never reached his eyes, which bored into Richard’s . He nodded once, and then bowed and said, “I must make my excuses, lady, gentlemen. Your good health.”

Richard raised his glass and nodded back.

Hortensia, said, in obvious mock complaint, “Literary crimes, my dear Mr. Jensen? Whatever could you mean?”

Richard said, with almost dead eyes, “Two words, Byron Schiller. ‘Dry twigs’.”

Hortensia and Bennett laughed loud and long.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, thank god for the clinical precision of Southern 'aristocrats'. I was going through Ken Burn's Civil War...in part to get the cadences of the speech of Havenites, and now every time Felicity speaks I hear Mary Chestnut. And I was DREADING having to use THAT word...the one that against all common sense (given that the theme is the commonality of all people) gets 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' banned with some regularity from schools.
> 
> So as Mary Chestnut's words rolled over me, I realized that the upper classes never sullied their lips with that word. They were so far above their slaves that they never actually felt the need to de-humanize someone they truly viewed as property, for the same reason we don't feel the need to degrade our cars.


	7. Chapter 6

When the three of them had made it back to the embassy, Richard led them into the skiff and they debriefed the afternoon and evening’s festivities. In addition to Richard, each faction leader had engaged Hannelore and Jonathon. Harrison Lawrence had leered over Hannelore and Felicity had discreetly flirted with Jonathon.

Hannelore laughed at the second rate theatrics. “You’d think they’ll eventually realize I’m more likely to go for Felicity…at least, I would if I were into airheaded racists.”

Richard smiled, “If this were the GRU we were up against, and they believed they had the slightest hope with a honey trap, they’d troll anything and everything in front of you until you bit or they were sure you never would. That being said…”

“If an airhead blonde with a drawl ends up in my bed, I won’t assume it’s because I suddenly became irresistible,” Hannelore finished.

Richard nodded, and then flashed a picture of Harrison Lawrence up on the wall. “Lawrence, coded…let’s see…ahhh, yes, BEDFORD. BEDFORD is highly motivated by, at first approximation, a level of racism that even in my time we wouldn’t have hesitated to call it that. The last time that attitude was permissible to express in polite company would have been the early 1970s. So he’s motivated, but…”

“How much does he believe his own propaganda?” finished Jonathon.

Hannelore nodded. “And if he’s a really deep down true believer in white supremacy, he might consider I and Jonathon…”

“And me,” noted Richard, “He has no idea I’m from the Early Twenty First.”

“…and you,” Hannelore said, “Not just mongrels, but stupid and easily duped and manipulated.”

“I kinda blew that opportunity,” Richard admitted.

Hannelore smiled, “No problem, nothing is stopping me and Jonathon from confirming his beliefs.”

Richard nodded. “It might be useful to confirm BEDFORD’s beliefs, if only to coax him into a mistake. At any rate, he is not a candidate for recruitment, and until we get a better handle on what we could do to discredit him in the eyes of our hosts…and more on that in a minute…we need to keep an eye on him, but he’s off limits for any kinds of recruitment or black ops.”

A picture of Felicity came up and Richard continued, “Felicity Harrison. Sister of BEDFORD, and we’re codenaming her BELLE. BELLE seems to be a feature wherever BEDFORD goes. She tried to lay on the Southern ‘charm’ when we were chatting...”

“Me too,” said Jonathon.

“Not I,” said Hannelore.

“Do you think that had to do with her orientation or her assumptions about you?” asked Richard.

“Earthpeople have something of a reputation at this point because we’ve never been shy about sharing our culture and we, as you may have noticed, are extremely sexually open minded,” Hannelore said, “Which is a roundabout way of saying if she wasn’t aware of the possibility that I’m bi, lesbian, and or genderfluid it’s because she’s had her head stuck in the sand all her life. I’m guess she’s not just playing it straight, but is actually strongly hetero at this time. Whether she was born an innie or an outie I couldn’t say. But I’m assuming Havenites aren’t quite as ‘morphically libertine’ as Earthpeople. Not many are.”

“So we can assume she flirts with men and only men solely because it amuses or gratifies her. Sparrows didn’t usually have the luxury of choice,” observed Richard.

At his team’s looks, he clarified, “‘Sparrow’ was the GRU term for their assets assigned to sexual entrapment, recruitment, and blackmail efforts. Basically, BELLE seems to be amusing herself, not dangling sexual favors for information. Not that that couldn’t be useful, at least in theory.”

“In theory?” asked Jonathon.

Richard nodded. He raised a finger, “Honeytraps…sexual entanglements to create recruitment opportunities or blackmail material or both…were and are high risk, high reward activities. The chance that the trapper forms an emotional attachment and becomes a risk is high.”

Jonathon nodded, “Gotcha.”

“At any rate, she bears watching,” Richard said. “There are two people from Haven on the ground here. She’s one of them. At the very least, she’s the only one who could possibly be approached for recruitment.”

A photo of Raquin went up. Richard said, “The Zola is our main problem. I had a very brief encounter with him, and he’ll be selecting someone to participate in the Balzac delegation to New Algiers.”

Hannelore spoke up, “I spent a great deal of time with him. He’s smart, strategically acute based on comments he made about Earth and Haven…and he’s a bit paranoid.”

Richard’s eyebrows went up. Hannelore shook her head, “Not clinically. Suspicious. Untrusting. The Social Darwinism seems to come from a place of deep skepticism about human nature.”

“Any way to train that skepticism on BEDFORD?” asked Richard.

Hannelore shrugged, “Maybe. But it would have to be real. He’s not going to fall for something trumped up.”

“Blackmail material on Raquin?” Richard continued.

“Maybe, but it wouldn’t be the usual. Society here doesn’t care about many of the same things many others get wrapped around the axle on, and what they do care about is damned hard to hide,” said Jonathon.

Richard’s eyebrows went up, and he said, “Such as?”

“Plagiarism, for example. One of the cardinal sins around here.”

“And…” continued Richard.

“They have a ‘net similar to our Universal Interface. Frankly, plagiarism is easy to detect with ‘bots going over everything people write and comparing it to existing works,” said Jonathon.

“What about plagiarism of stuff not yet published?” Richard asked.

Jonathon shook his head. “Their Interface automatically logs writing with all but impossible to fake time/date/location stamps. In the event that two writers independently come up with similar sounding phrases, the Interface can prove they came up with them without theft. You’d be shocked how much their legal system is concerned with proper attribution.”

Richard smiled grimly, “You’d be shocked at how utterly unshocked I am. When I was in the field, I was a practicing specialist in every aspect of human nature. If people build reputations around something, social constraints follow.”

Richard looked at both of them and added, “I suppose he could have plagiarized from someone, and killed them before they could publish…but I doubt it.”

Hannelore nodded. “Maybe, but it’s worth checking as a concept for the main leaders and their staff.”

Jonathon shook his head, “I wouldn’t hold my breath. We’d be better off looking for dirt on BEDFORD or BELLE that would shock and appall people here.”

“True, but what happens if the Naturalists drop some masterpiece just before elections? Public outrage about Haven may not be enough,” Richard said.

“How likely is that?” asked Hannelore.

Richard shook his head, “I don’t give a damn how likely it is, I’m not risking Laura even on the overwhelming likelihood that discrediting Haven will work. I need a damn sure thing!”

Hannelore and Jonathon looked over sharply at that.

“Don’t you trust CentGov?” asked Jonathon.

Richard looked back, “And what exactly did Dean have to promise to get me out of the deepfreeze?”

Hannelore sighed, “She had to promise to throw her support to a more isolationist faction inside CentGov. By inclination, she’s much more comfortable with the Space Administration’s plans for exploration and expansion, but the Department of Defense is far more inclined to worry only about the Sol system. She had to throw her weight behind a proposal to put in additional monitors in everyone’s interface feeds.”

“What?” said Richard.

“By and large, CentGov doesn’t care what you do, where you go, who you meet,” started Jonathon.

“…until they do,” Hannelore said, giving Jonathon a look.

Richard sighed, “I can’t say I’m surprised. The surveillance state was well advanced in the Twenty First. Four more centuries, one of which was from hell, and I guess I should have expected it. CentGov makes your lives comfortable, pleasant, doesn’t care what you do in your private lives…hell it facilitates it. All for the low, low price of ‘There are some things you can NOT do.’ I’m guessing number one on that list is try and change the government much.”

Hannelore nodded. “It’s not that bad a deal, Richard. I’ve read the histories. When you were born they still sometimes killed women like me. Or men who wanted to be women. And the Big Collapse was horrible. You can’t imagine. People MELTED Richard. I’m not even exaggerating.”

Richard shook his head. “I understand, I really do. It’s hard to give up on even the pretense of privacy, but I do understand. But you have to understand, it’s far from perfect in my eyes. Even if it is necessary.”

Jonathon sighed, “No government is perfect Richard. You have to give us that.”

Richard smiled thinly. “I do. Why do you think I’m working so hard to fight off Haven?”

“To get your wife back? Because Haven is so unremittingly awful that the enemy of your enemy is your employer?” Jonathon shot back.

Richard chuckled, “Point. I guess you’re just going to have to wait until I get Laura back to find out where my allegiances lie.”

 

The next couple weeks were consumed in meetings, one on one and in groups. On the third week, a starship, the ESS Warspite, arrived. Because mission planning was easier when conducted in person, the Chameleon had been detailed to take the trip out to New Algiers, and the Warspite detailed to maintaining orbit and security around Balzac. In addition, at the request of the Chair of Balzac, Samuel Bennet, Richard and Hannelore were detailed to escort the delegation from Balzac to New Algiers. 

Because there was no way that Richard was about to let BEDFORD and BELLE move through Balzac society unanswered, Jonathon remained behind. He might have been prickly by nature, but his personality flaws were less of an impediment in a society such as Balzac’s, which seemed to be argumentative by nature. And he could most easily continue looking for compromising material on BEDFORD, as he had not tipped his hand. While Richard had let the Opposition know he at least was no fool, Jonathon had not. He could work on BEDFORD and BELLE from a vantage point of being far sharper than they might suspect.

Still Richard was not thrilled at being maneuvered into leaving the planet almost as soon as he’d arrived. And with any potential assets as yet unrecruited, he was left to rely on Jonathon. And thus he’d blown a good week and half trying to discreetly discern the origin of the request. Only to find that Chair Bennet had originated the request.

As it turned out, that was because Richard had done too good a job at the first salon. Both the Head of the Realists (and Chair of the planet), and the Byron of the Romantics, Hortensia Schiller, were on the flight, representing their respective factions. Only the Zola Raquin was not going on the mission.

When he’d learned that, Richard had immediately requested a meeting with Bennet.

“What on Earth…,” started Richard, and then he amended it to, “What on Sigma Draconis b are you thinking?”

Bennet smiled, “Why hello, Mr. Jensen. It’s a pleasure to see you too.”

Richard stopped for a second, and then said, “You know exactly what you’re doing don’t you?”

Chair Bennet smiled and nodded. “If you mean am I deliberately leaving a power vacuum to see exactly what might happen? Yes.”

Richard shook his head. “That’s incredibly risky.”

Bennet simply shrugged, “I suspect that you don’t fully understand how different we are here. It would be almost impossible to launch some kind of revolution. Here on Balzac we take literary merit incredibly seriously. If the Zola were to pen a masterpiece, spur imitators through his movement, move the population with force of his literary merit, and then take Balzac into an alliance with Haven? He’d certainly succeed. Hell, I’d step aside happily. And I hate those Havenites.”

Bennet sat and waved Richard to sit as well, “But if he rolled in here with thousands of armed troops, and Havenite assistance in some kind of putsch? There is no level of force that would let him succeed. The best he and his allies could achieve would be to destroy Balzac.”

“What makes you think he wouldn’t be OK with that outcome?” Richard asked.

“I don’t mean ‘destroy’ the way I suspect you do. You’re thinking, ‘Balzac would stop being unique, and would be just another cog in the slavery machine’, aren’t you?”

When Richard nodded, Bennet shook his head, “No, Mr. Jensen, I mean ‘destroy’ in the ‘Everything reduced to gray nano-goo’ sense. This planet, this culture will not give up what makes us unique. Except for the Kingdom of Montival on Prime, I am unaware of a human planet built around a philosophical concept alone, without recourse to geographic origins. We will remain true to our founding precepts.”

“But…”

Bennet laughed, “When you offered literary works from outside the Nineteenth Century…and earlier of course, we’re not contextless fools…you were approaching us on OUR level. When that clod Lawrence offered money and power, he lost my interest instantly. And he’d utterly ignored Hortensia, which is how I know he’s a fool. YOU offered works from later than our founders’ obsession. I’ve wanted to study Steinbeck ever since Earth contacted us.”

Richard looked shocked. “Then you’ll declare for AIL?”

Bennet’s lips quirked, “Of course not. Or not yet. We’re not idiots, ourselves. We don’t need to just see whether we should ally with AIL or Haven. We also need to also see if we should ally with anyone at all.”

Richard nodded. “Fair point.”

Bennet went on, “But as a society we HAVE grown beyond our original limits. I want to read from the last five centuries.”

Richard smiled, “But back to why I came to visit…,”

“We’ll be fine Mr. Jensen. I don’t believe the Zola is stupid enough to try anything physical. He’s more than welcome to spend the time trying to write a masterpiece. As I said, he does that, and I’ll escort him to the Chair’s Office personally.”

Richard, exasperated, said, “It’s not just him I’m worried about. Lawrence will still be here.”

“Well one Lawrence, anyway. Felicity is staying. But the Zola offered a spot in his faction’s delegation to Mr. Lawrence. We’re each sending three.”

“What?”

“Well we decided that only one voice was too susceptible to confirmation bias.”

“No, I meant, Lawrence is coming? You think an Earthship is going to carry a Havenite?” Richard said.

“If they want to carry any of us? Yes. I was just going to call your Captain Asselin.”

“Mission Commander Asselin.”

Bennet smiled, “Is there a difference?”

Jensen nodded, “A captain is a military position. Mission Commander is a civilian position.”

“Your ships are unarmed?”

“These days? Hardly. But they are not primarily warships. They’re explorers.” Richard said.

Just then a secretary came in, and he announced that Mission Commander Asselin was on the line.

Bennet stood and faced a holodisplay, in which Cecile had appeared. When they’d finished the pleasantries, the Chair got down to business. 

“As I just informed your emissary here,” and he gestured at Richard, “We’ve determined the mission to New Algiers’ composition.”

Cecile gave him a vibrant smile, “Excellent, We can finish final preperations immediately.”

Bennet said, “There will be 9 total from Balzac. Hortensia Schiller, Hope Daniels, and Daniel Holmes from the Romantic faction. Myself, Davis Alvarez, and Rachel Foucoult from the Realists. And Henry Jorgenson, Letitia Wu…and Harrison Lawrence for the Naturalists.”

Cecile started. “I’m sorry, did you say Harrison Lawrence?”

Bennet nodded.

“THE Harrison Lawrence?”

Bennet sighed. “Yes. He was named by the Zola, personally.”

Cecile looked troubled. “You understand, I’m going to have to consult with my superiors about this, yes?”

Bennet nodded. He said, “I’ll finish planning with Mr. Jensen, while you consult with your superiors, and then we can begin the process of departing.”

Cecile nodded, and signed off.

Richard said to Bennet, “You’re awfully blasé about leaving the only planet you’ve ever known.”

Bennet looked serious for a few moments then his face broke into a huge grin. “You have no idea how excited I actually am. We’d never even really bothered with much orbital infrastructure beyond the essential…weather and communications satellites and the like. I can’t wait!”

Richard smiled at Bennet. Against his better judgement, he found himself liking the man more and more.

_Doesn’t mean I won’t betray him at the drop of a hat if I have to._

_Just that I won’t unless I really have to._

With that cheery thought, Richard worked out the basics with the Chair, until he could gracefully make his exit and get back to the embassy and the skiff. When he arrived Hannelore and Jonathon were already in a threeway conversation with Cecile on the Chameleon, and Evelyn Dean with two people from CentGov, and an AIL representative on Earth.

The first CentGov official was a square jawed, soft spoken man. The other was far more androgynous. The AIL rep was clearly, and charmingly female. Richard’s Interface IDed all three. The AIL rep’s name was Marie Trousseau. The classically handsome male was labeled Jack Eldridge, and he was the head of the CentGov Space Administration. The androgynous individual was labeled George O’Dowd with they, their, them as their preferred pronouns. They were the head of the CentGov’s military.

When Richard walked in O’Dowd was speaking, “….fine. We roll in with a few more warships then. No way is a HAVENITE aboard one of my ships.”

Eldridge broke in, “It’s not YOUR ship, George. It’s mine. Not that I’m happy about it either.”

Richard joined the call. “Doesn’t matter. My remit is to get this planet into AIL’s sphere of influence. And I guarantee if we use THEIR plan,” and he stabbed a finger at O’Dowd, “The absolute best we could hope for is angry neutrality from people here. They are deadly serious about their way of life.”

Dean looked sour, “How sure are you?”

“A1, ma’am. I just got done with a conversation with the Chair of Balzac. I wasn’t any happier about the prospect of BEDFORD aboard the Chameleon than any of you, but I’d just gotten done warning Bennet about even traveling while leaving BEDFORD behind to cause trouble. He basically told me that the population here would reduce everything to gray goo before they let someone else take over.”

As he expected, everyone on the call turned pale. The memory of how many on Earth had died during the Big Collapse had his desired effect. Even O’Dowd tacitly agreed to BEDFORD’s presence. At that point it was all over but the shouting. Or more like all over but the planning. Which was extensive and went on for quite a while.

Richard sat back and stared into the distance.

_I wish I were happier about this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it's been a while. Partly that's because the last couple chapters in particular were being run past a modern literature professor friend. Who has prefaced his notes to me with "You're an A+ plotter. You fucking fuck."
> 
> So that's good, I think? Writing may pick up, as work is calming down somewhat. I'm done with this chapter and ready to kick off seven. Notes will be enthusiatically sought and incorporated (probably). Chapter one in particular received a not inconsiderable re-write.


	8. Chapter 7

As the talks wound down, Richard was jotting notes on Klaatu. As soon as the conference ended, he gathered his team and spoke.

“We have about a week to get set up for separate operations. What is the local asset situation?” he began.

Hannelore called, “Susan,” then gestured and added, “I have two contacts in government that I’ve been working on. They’re both Romantics, but work for Bennet’s government. They seem ridiculously happy about all the dead drop and contact protocols. It’s been all I can do to get them to keep it simple. That being said, I’m getting the impression that we missed something important about the relationship between Realists and Romantics here.”

Richard smiled, “That Hortensia Schiller and Samuel Bennet are sleeping together?”

Hannelore laughed, “Yeah, that’s what I was implying.”

Jonathon shook his head. “That’s not as funny as you to make it out to be,” he said. “The Zola feels isolated. Raquin is more dangerous than they think. I’ve been cultivating a Naturalist in their critical community, just a meet n’ greet. Nothing serious yet, and nothing compromising, but I suspect Raquin is closer to the edge than Bennet and Schiller think. Let me forward this,” and he made a sliding flinging gesture.

Immediately Klaatu showed a scene in a steet café. Jonathon was speaking to a man IDed as ‘Oscar Livingston’ a highly respected literary critic.

Livingston said, “”I tell you, my friend, that I worry. These Lawrence siblings are the very devils with their hooks in the Zola. And with the Byron and the Head leaving with you earthmen…”

Jonathon in the recording asked, “What worries you?”

“I fear that Raquin will listen too well to that Felicity. Mark my words, she means to make trouble when your friends have left. And not the kind involving cutting phrases in a salon.”

Jonathon in the recording asked, “How well do you know Felicity Lawrence?”

“Well enough to know that Raquin is smitten by her. Other than that, I have met her socially a few times.”

Jonathon in the room raised his eyebrows as Livingston, on the tape, continued, “I could see her getting him to do any one of a number of foolish things at her brother’s behest.”

Richard rubbed his eyes. He’d been doing that a lot lately, as his old nervous tic of polishing eyeglasses had been obsoleted. He sighed heavily. “Jonathon, what kind of actions can we take to forestall any rash actions on the part of BELLE?”

Jonathon spoke carefully, “The two security people here have their hands full with just our tiny little embassy.”

Hannelore said, “Then what?”

Richard raised a finger, “We have to know what BELLE and the Zola are up to. Jonathon, is there any way to compromise Livingston so that he can be operationalized quickly?”

Jonathon shook his head, “I don’t think so.”

Richard nodded once, sharply, “Fine, then reach out to him on principles. It’s not the weirdest thing in the world for someone to start spying because they think they’re doing the more moral thing as a result.”

Jonathon nodded. Richard tended to forget that his two teammates were rookies at this sort of thing. They were exceptionally bright people, and quick on the uptake. The only thing Richard had on any of them was decades of experience with the worst aspects of human nature. Speaking of which…

_I’d better be able to get Laura out of cryo soon, or they may not actually need me._

Richard nodded once, both to himself and to Hannelore. She took up her piece.

“As you suspected, the rift between Realists and Romantics here might be real at the street level, and philosophically as authors even between Schiller and Bennet. But from a political, in OUR sense of the term, standpoint there’s almost no daylight between the factions. So my two assets are already all in. They want to stick it to the Havenites. As long as Jonathon maintains my contacts and drops we should get at least some heads up about things in the government, specifically defense and police functions.”

Richard nodded. “Anything else?”

When the two shook their heads, he stood up, “We need as many assets inside the Naturalists as we can cultivate. But…” he looked around, “NOT at the risk of exposure or blowback. The one week deadline is arbitrary. Don’t let it start driving your schedules. If something is off do not force it.”

Then he shooed them out of the skiff and began pulling files. Everything he could find about Raquin, the Lawrences, and the Naturalists.

 

Two long days later, his virtual piles of paperwork were neatly sorted, mostly because Klaatu would interpret careless flinging of ‘files’ as an instruction to carefully stack them in a virtual space. Back in the past an intensive session like this would have left Richard’s office space an ungodly clutter of mildly classified materials, and notes to more secret file numbers in various piles.

His “literally pile up the evidence” method was his preferred method, but with Klaatu, the piles existed only for him. Therefore wherever he went they were available, and all the highly classified material could be right there in the ‘piles’ whenever he needed them. That was convenient.

Less convenient was the near total lack of history or context. The vast majority of the content was generated by him. In a sense all he was really doing was not so much mining data as gathering his thoughts. Most of the patterns in the data were based on his own way of thinking, and Richard was too practical to think he had all the answers. What he had here was an impressive amount of intellectual onanism.

He heaved a great sigh and got dressed for dinner. There was to be a reception at the Chair residence for those traveling on the Chameleon to New Algiers, and some additional ‘plus ones’ as well as planetary movers and shakers. Thus Richard was not only anticipating a tedious time with BEDFORD, but also BELLE and Raquin, who were virtually certain to put in at least an appearance, and more likely, remain for the duration.

As with the salon two weeks earlier, he dressed in Earth styles. Unlike the salon two weeks earlier, he’d had time to tailor design passive sensors including cameras and recording devices, and incorporate them into his clothing.

His worst fears were realized when he found himself across from BEDFORD and just down from the Zola. Lawrence set the stage quickly, by sitting down with a wide smile, “Ah! Mr. Jensen! How is my favorite Twain scholar?”

Richard put a smile on his face but at this point didn’t bother to let it reach his eyes. He’d be stuck on a ship with BEDFORD for about 22 days as the Chameleon made its way to Procyon from Sigma Draconis. He wasn’t going to be able to fake any level of friendship with BEDFORD. The trick was to keep hate out of the equation. And for that, Richard had experience.

“Mr. Lawrence. I’m surprised your sister isn’t here,” he replied.

BEDFORD made a small moue of distaste.

_I wonder what that’s about._

Lawrence then replied, “I believe she is still getting dressed. She does so love to make an entrance. And our fashions are not truly meant to be put on by one’s self, you understand.”

Richard nodded, “Entirely, Mr. Lawrence.”

At that moment, BELLE arrived in a scarlet gown, with a voluminous petticoated skirt, and a pulled in waist that looked like it verged on painful. She smiled regally to all as she glided into the room. The Zola, Raquin, was up almost instantly and strode over to greet her. She nodded as he took her hand and led her over to his side, three seats down from Richard, and rather closer to Hannelore.

With his sister’s grand entrance complete, BEDFORD resumed sparring with Richard. “So, like so many others, you maintain that Mark Twain was not a Southerner?”

“I would say rather, that like many of his contemporaries from the Border States of the time; Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland…that he was of neither nation. But his humanism clearly leaves him out of the Lost Cause camp.”

“Again with the Lost Cause, Mr. Jenkins. We’ve had this discussion.”

“I would say rather our discussion was curtailed,” Richard replied. “Make no mistake, Mr. Lawrence, the South lost. The blacks of the time were set free, and numerous idealists went south to try and bring their education and lives up to standards their owners had too long denied them.”

“To stations which their natural attributes rightly denied them,” Lawrence answered.

Richard shook his head, “It will truly be a trying time for us both, this upcoming voyage, but you could not be more wrong. If you raise a child in complete darkness, of course they will squint and have trouble seeing at first. That is not the natural limitation of the child, that’s a result of abuse from an adult.”

“So you agree that the Negro is as a child. Or was.”

Richard shook his head no. “I am saying that simply because you kept someone uneducated, their lack of education as a result of your actions is no cause to further the abuse. Be that as it may, in the end too many politicians wanted to sweep everything under the rug. There was too much money in expanding West, and too much interest in maintaining the status quo on the part of the wealthy in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. Even Twain, who had a tendency to go through fortunes with distressing rapidity, didn’t note the degree to which Reconstruction was left barely begun.”

“And how does that lead to our discussion about this alleged ‘Lost Cause’?” Lawrence asked.

Richard raised an eyebrow, “Because the Lost Cause was a mythic retelling of the Civil War. Instead of a bloody slog to right an inhuman wrong the entire thing was recast, for Southerners, as a romantic sunset of gentility. The end of a better age.”

Richard shook his head, “Slowly, over time, the cause was glossed over, and then actually lied about. The cause of the war went from regrettable to ennobled. And in the end, your ancestors,” and Richard nodded towards Lawrence, “So internalized that lie and took it to the stars, that you sit here genuinely flummoxed by Earth History.”

Lawrence glowered as Richard concluded, and replied, “Were this Haven sir, you might find yourself entertaining a rather more…pointed…rejoinder, but suffice it to say that I greatly dispute your characterization of my country as founded on a lie.”

“Nevertheless,” Richard replied, “Though if you prefer ‘an inherited misperception not of your making’ I could see that.”

Lawrence colored further, reaching a notable red shade. “I have inherited no such misperception, sir,” he began hotly.

Richard interrupted, “OK, ‘lie’ it is.”

At that, Harrison slid his chair back to get up. Felicity laid a hand on his arm. “Harrison...brother…do calm yourself.”

Lawrence sank back, but slowly.

Felicity turned to Richard, “That was ill natured sir. Why do you find such delight in vexing us?”

“Because your ‘cause’ is reprehensible, madam. You may have deceived some of my associates with regard to your cause, but I know better. I’ve studied American Reconstruction, as part of studying Twain. The ways in which Southern whites attempted to paper over the true nature of what they were doing…attempting to reinstitute slavery under another name…terrorizing Black communities? They were vile, not noble.”

Felicity too turned pale, “Why do you seem so determined to ruin a perfectly good meal, Mr. Jensen?”

_Because I need your focus on me. I’m untouchable. And I need you thinking that Jonathon might be malleable. Even if you don’t try to recruit him and provide us a double agent opportunity, just by what you ask him you’ll reveal your intentions. And since Haven’s ‘senior partner’ is coming with us, I also want him off-balance. If I can do that by being rude to slaveholders, so much the better._

“I seek to ruin nothing, Miss Lawrence. I do, however, seek to set the terms of engagement. The people here,” and he glanced around, “Deserve to know exactly how your society came to be.”

Richard gestured about the table. “The people of Balzac came here to create a society built to celebrate Nineteenth Century literature. Not recreate the conditions. For one thing, contracting typhus from bad drains strikes me as something to be avoided. But basing a society on literature, and basing their government on literary merit? No one’s ever tried it. I wish them the best. But plenty of societies have tried your method.”

Richard was just getting warmed up. He had pre-planned his insult, and the speech. Being seated next to Lawrence just allowed him to set the trap off right away.

He looked over, “All through history, up to the Big Collapse, many societies were founded and run on oppression. On scapegoating some group so that the people in power could keep that power. For too long, no matter whether the government was nominally authoritarian, monarchical, republican, or democratic the people who were at the top found one of the easiest ways they could maintain their power was by dividing their polity, whatever it might be. The form of the government didn’t really matter. Just the effect.” 

Richard put his spoon down, “Slaveholding was always primarily a way of maintaining power. The rulers had a source of cheap labor and a group of victims that everyone else, no matter how lowly, could feel superior to and most importantly a ready-made threat with which to terrify the population at large,” and here Richard’s eyes bored into Harrison Lawrence’s. “I imagine that you large slaveholders keep the majority of whites on your planet worried with constant announcements of incipient Black unrest, don’t you? Nothing like some poor schmuck much more worried about personal safety than how the powers that be are screwing with him.”

Lawrence had thoroughly reddened at that point.

_I wonder if he’ll burst a blood vessel and save everyone some trouble?_

Richard finished, “The people of Balzac came to study and create and work in the style of Nineteenth Century Literature. Not to recreate the Nineteenth Century. Your people on the other hand, have deliberately recreated an element of the Nineteenth Century that ought to have been forgotten. You have quite deliberately recreated a great crime.”

Lawrence then stood up, dropped his napkin, and, glaring at Richard said, “I find the odor at this end of the table somewhat noxious. I believe I shall move elsewhere.”

Felicity stood up and followed her brother, as they made their way to the other end of the table. The Zola looked over at Richard speculatively.

“You did that on purpose,” Raquin said, eventually.

Richard looked over at the Zola’s statement impassively. “Not necessarily.”

As fate would have it, BEDFORD and BELLE ended up not far from Jonathon. Richard kept a discreet eye on the group while making small talk. The Zola looked thoughtful for most of the dinner.

 

At the end of the dinner, Bennet and Schiller asked Hannelore and Richard to stay back. When the small group had retired to a sitting room, the Chair, Bennet, took it on himself to serve drinks. Then he sat next to Schiller and nodded at her.

She turned to Jensen, and said, “Well you seemed to set off Lawrence. He was quite livid for some time.”

Richard nodded. “You’ve read Twain, I’m suspect. I’m certain the Chair has. You know his attitudes regarding slavery and racism…not only was he progressive for his time, he would have been considered highly progressive for some time after that. And his attitude towards the kind of things that the Havenites revere was not hidden. Let’s be honest, those attitudes are among the reasons I gravitated towards Twain.”

“And when you met the Havenites in person…” Bennet said.

“I disliked them. On first exchange of views. There is no reason for me to hide that fact…the AIL and the Havenite Alliance are locked in a contest and I see no reason to pretend that I don’t find their attitudes reprehensible,” Richard replied.

“I tend to agree with you,” began Bennet, and when Richard opened his mouth to speak, Bennet raised a finger and went on, “And were I solely responsible for myself, as you are, I would act the same. But I am not. I am responsible for an entire planet and moreover, for maintaining what is unique about my world. Preserving the entire reason we came here.”

Richard nodded. Hannelore leaned forward, and said, “But the AIL doesn’t require homogeneity. We let each planet do their own thing.”

Richard laid a hand on Hannelore’s arm. He nodded at Schiller and Bennet. “The Havenites could and do say the same thing, with equal validity. Avalon is free to run their affairs their own way.”

_And CentGov isn’t exactly 100% reliable either._

Richard looked at The Chair and The Byron, “But AIL didn’t start off trying to invade planets only to give up solely because it proved impossible. So there is that.”

Schiller inclined her head as if to say, “Point taken.”

But then she said, “This is why we must go to New Algiers. To see for ourselves. Richard, were it simply of a matter of who we two trust more, who has been more honest with us,” and Richard winced inwardly, “The decision would be made. But we have an obligation to our people. All of them.”

Richard nodded. “That’s more than fair, Byron, Chair. For what it’s worth, I do understand.”

As they left, Hannelore took Richard’s elbow. “What was that back there?” she asked.

Richard grimaced, “They’re not wrong. From their point of view.”

Hannelore opened her mouth again, but Richard interrupted, “We’re asking them to bet their entire society on our good word. If I were them I’d want more than a ‘Trust me,’ as well. Especially because I’m not entirely certain CentGov IS all that trustworthy.”

She still looked upset, but she nodded. He smiled, not unkindly, and said, “Let’s head back. We have a lot of work to do in the next day and a half.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I know. It's been a while. 
> 
> I am going to finish this, but work/life/writing balance has been a little out of whack. I hope to pick up the pace a bit. But part of the problem is (if I'm honest) that in taking too much time between writing is that I have to re-read everything to make sure I'm not contradicting myself.
> 
> The next time I post an original work, I'm FINISHING the book and posting the second pass through (what Neil Gaiman calls "going back and making it look like that's what you intended all along"). But I'm actually enjoying myself. Having said that...for the love of GOD, please do not think that anything that comes out of the mouth of anyone with the surname "Lawrence" is anything less than the OPPOSITE of what I think.


	9. Chapter 8

The flight up to the Chameleon the day after was much more to Richard’s Twenty First Century expectations. Among other things, though they never felt the acceleration they did get to see it. After takeoff and climbing to about 13,000 meters, the lander shot upwards from a level flight. As speed increased and the air pressure fell the wings continually retracted until they finally disappeared entirely and the lander was once again a cylinder.

The nine passengers were thrilled by the ride. Or more like the eight. Lawrence looked bored. Or as bored as someone pretty transparently trying to memorize everything he was seeing could look. Richard watched him impassively.

_Not too subtle. But is it because he’s an amateur, albeit gifted, or because since he is obviously what he is, might as well? But there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s not like I’m gonna blindfold him for the entire trip._

__

__

_I’ll just make a mental note to make sure he has a minder._

Two hours later, the ‘A’ Lander had caught up to the Chameleon, matched velocity and then docked. An iris opened in the deck and the entire group climbed down. Bennet and Schiller stayed close together, as did their contingents. In fact, despite their Romantic and Realist ‘politics’, Daniel Holmes and David Alverez were holding hands and looking around. And only needed one stateroom. More proof, not that Richard needed it, that the fundamental differences on Balzac were more artistic than political, and that those differences did not affect relationships.

Nevertheless, the Naturalists held themselves a bit more aloof, and Lawrence was completely off to one side on his own. A crewmember led everyone to their cabins. Richard learned he had gotten the same one from the flight from Earth to Balzac, and this time Hannelore was next to him. After getting settled they all went and ate dinner. While it was early, they all wanted to get on ship time as soon as possible.

After arrival, Harrison Lawrence never went anywhere without a crewmember shadowing him. He didn’t let it stop him, but he did frequently look a tad put out. When he arrived in the dining area (for that meal anyway) he sat off by himself, with only his minder for company.

Richard and Hannelore, on the other hand, sat by Bennet and Schiller and had a fine time socializing. Richard was vaguely scandalized to find Cecile drinking wine, and quite a lot of it, with dinner and flirting outrageously with not only him, but Bennet. The flirting was fine. He was mainly shocked to see how drunk she’d gotten.

He figured it out when a crewmember came up and whispered something in her ear. Cecile sat up suddenly and said “Collette, assiste moi,” made a gesture and instantly sobered up. As Cecile departed, however, Hortensia bearded Richard, saying, “I know you only are your government’s representative, but can you arrange for a tour of this marvelous vessel tomorrow?” 

He looked over at Lawrence and sighed.

_I should have expected this. And there’s no way I’m going to be able to exclude BEDFORD. Well, I can go find Cecile on the bridge and arrange to make sure anything that Secretary Eldridge doesn’t want seen is covered up or avoided._

__

__

_Hell, this was inevitable. I’d be shocked if the Mission Commander hasn’t already planned for it._

After dinner he made his way to the center of the ship and found Cecile finishing her checks as the transitioned to supra-luminal ‘velocities’.

“Nothing problematic, I trust.”

Cecile laughed, “No, but there were some issues with the Flicker Drive. Local time-space disturbances. Nothing severe, but the crew know that I prefer to be around whenever anything is not totally normal.”

Richard smiled, “Well then, I won’t keep you. You should know that the delegations would like a tour of the Chameleon. Is that something we can arrange on short notice?”

“In fact, Director, that was something we planned for before we ever departed Earth. It was one of the most predictable of the requests we expected would be made,” Cecile replied.

“Oh lord, no need to be so formal. ‘Relax, spook boy, I got this,’ would’ve done just as well. I suspected you’d be all ready, ummm, already.”

Cecile dimpled as she replied, “I am sorry. That was a little officious wasn’t it. I sort of forgot how informal you really are. I should have given you credit.”

Richard shook his head. “No biggie. No blood, no foul. As it is, ship time is 2300, and I should get to bed. If I don’t get my bodily rhythm on the ship’s schedule fast, the next twenty days are going to suck.”

Cecile nodded knowingly, and waved him off. “Au revoir, Richard. Sleep well.”

 

Richard didn’t. He was trying to go to sleep too early at least as far as his internal clock went, and he was young and healthy and less inclined to an early bedtime than he’d been as a 70 year old man. He woke, and when he couldn’t get back to sleep he sat up, frustrated. He opened his door to step out and see if he couldn’t grab a snack before trying to fall asleep.

Which is how he happened to catch Cecile leaving Hannelore’s cabin. Cecile froze, and then as Richard grinned at her, smiled back herself, put a finger to her lips and said, “The Mission Commander mustn’t be seen as playing favorites.”

“Except for exceptionally attractive AIL spooks?” asked Richard. 

“Oui. The delectably female ones anyway,” Cecile replied.

“This,” Richard gestured at himself, “Is not what I imagine myself looking like. But I wasn’t even thinking of myself, honest. Not to mention that even if you weren’t gay, I’m very happily married.”

Cecile smiled, and kissed Richard on the cheek. “I know. I make a point of knowing exactly who is on my vessel, Director Jensen.”

Richard laughed gently, “At least now, I don’t have to worry about the flirting. ‘Cecile, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’.”

She looked puzzled but he simply chuckled and waved her off.

The next morning, he sat down with Hannelore. “So…”

Hannelore grimaced, “Cecile told me you caught her coming out of the cabin.”

Richard laughed, “I would love to be the kind of spymaster who uses compromising information about a subordinate to get you to take outrageous risks on my behalf, but first, I know that you are exclusively lesbian…because I read dossiers about my staff, and because no matter how open minded the society, sexual entrapment is still a known risk…and I believe that you are highly discreet. That last I infer because out of over 2 billion people, CentGov picked you to be one of two to solicit the help of a newly thawed out Twenty First Century Intelligence Officer. Bluntly, it’s not like two people not in each other’s reporting chain in a relationship whose nature they can freely admit, are exactly first rate blackmail targets anyway.”

He continued, “And second, I’ve implied you remind me of my first daughter, Olivia. There’s a period where Laura and I were certain she was a lesbian. No boyfriends, plenty of close female friends. The whole thing. You’d think a pair of spooks, trained in every way to assess and manipulate people would have known, but no. It never occurred to us that it was simply that no boy had yet measured up in her eyes. It might be a cliché but when she fell in love, she did so like she does everything else…decisively. She married the one who measured up to her expectations. But you,” and he pointed, “Get to have the benefit of Laura and I having had long conversation about her where we checked our assumptions and we agreed that whoever our child loved, we would love too. It’s not like the Twenty First was a hotbed of homophobia, but if there’s anything this entire mission says it’s that old prejudices die hard, and sometimes you don’t even know you have them.”

Hannelore said, “Director, nothing will compromise our mission…”

Richard interrupted her, “Do you love her or is it a ‘shipboard romance’? To be clear, I actually don’t care which it is as your boss. I only care as your friend.”

Hannelore thought for a good while. Then she looked at Richard, “I love her,” and then she nodded to herself, “Huh. I do love her. Thanks boss.”

Richard smiled, “Good. You might want to tell her. Anyway, there is absolutely no reason the second in command of the AIL Intelligence Mission to Balzac can’t have a relationship with the Mission Commander of the ship transporting her. None. Go for it.”

_And now she’ll walk across hot coals for me. There’s more than one way to manipulate a person._

Hannelore smiled at Richard, “Thanks again boss,” and she turned to leave, no doubt to speak with Cecile, when she turned back, and asked, “Hey boss, what exactly did you mean old prejudices die hard?”

Richard shook his head, “Not against homosexuals, Hannelore. Against Southerners. My great great great GREAT grandfather rode with Sherman through Georgia and South Carolina. I have always had a residual, but significant, grudge against the Lost Cause South…and sometimes I would conflate ALL Southerners with Lost Causers.”

Hannelore frowned, “And that’s bad because…?”

Richard replied, “Because I need to evaluate my tactics and attitude towards the Lawrences without dragging what I admit is a long standing grudge against them. I’m frankly happier opposing them than I was working against the Russians. I have to constantly check my own motives. But I have to say, dragging that lout Harrison into feeding me a line for pre-prepared rant is kind of amusing.”

Richard sent Hannelore off, presumably to have a heart to heart with Cecile, and turned around, feeling slightly skeevy…but not all that skeevy…for having manipulated Hannelore. He’d had to compromise his morals before and now facing another rather considerably longer lifetime of work in intelligence, was sure he’d feel that way again. Quite a lot in fact. 

Contrary to popular myth in the Twenty First, spies by and large weren’t all that conflicted. Or Intelligence Officers, responsible for recruiting, motivating, and manipulating spies weren’t. Nor were they particularly engaged in feats of derring do. Mostly, they talked to people, figured out how to get what they wanted from others, and not get caught at it.

Richard had volunteered, in the form of a job application to the CIA, when he was recruited from university fresh from an anthropology major. In a way, the cultural relativism espoused by Boaz for dealing with people of other cultures could just as easily apply to interactions in the community Richard had found himself a part of. He was not a moral relativist…having given his allegiance he maintained it…but he was comfortable with more moral ambiguity than the average person.

It had made him a good spy. He’d seen too many amoral assholes go beyond the pale, so to speak, and find themselves on the street. They were probably the spiritual forbears of many of the nihilists of the Big Collapse. And on the other hand he’d seen others struggle to reconcile their personal beliefs, morals, and ethics with the required duplicity and secretiveness of his chosen profession and end up either a mess or in prison. Or both.

Richard had threaded a middle road. He had truly believed that a society that by and large tried to maximize the freedom and happiness of the majority of its citizens most of the time, while by and large leaving them to their own devices was preferable to most of the alternate systems. He was not by nature doctrinaire, instinctively distrusting “one true” believers no matter what their nominal ideology. He was a deep believer in the virtue of ‘kinda, sorta’. It had made him maddeningly uninteresting, and without many handles for the opposition to use. Which in turn made him an excellent spy. 

But he did harbor loyalty to family…and his superiors had known it. They’d used Laura at times to enforce compliance. They’d never, however, gone so far as to imply any kind of threat, no matter how mild, against the rest of his family. Somewhere along the line the people responsible for manipulating HIM the way he’d just gotten done manipulating Hannelore had figured out that Laura, as a fellow spook, was somehow more of a legal target for threats of adverse job actions in his mind than his children.

The fact that Hannelore was a fellow Intelligence Officer made it permissible for Richard to manipulate her. But Hannelore truly reminded him more and more of Olivia, and that is what gave Richard the skeeves. She didn’t look like Olivia physically, but as he’d gotten to know the young lady she had reminded him more and more not just of Olivia, but of both his daughters. She had Olivia’s tendency to get toe to toe with Richard and challenge him, and she had a lot of Eleanor’s fire and sass.

She reminded him of his long lost family. So much so that even in his own mind he was seeing her as another daughter. And as he walked down the corridor, or companionway since the ESA tended to use naval terminology, another thought popped into his head.

_What if that was CentGov’s plan all along?_

 

As he’d thought, Cecile already had crewmembers ready to go with a tour that more than satisfied any sightseeing urges while minimizing compromised secrets. It did help that AIL, CentGov, and ESA knew which “secrets” had already been compromised by the loss of the ship that had first arrived at Haven.

And since most of the improvements in the ships since that early spacecraft were found in the nanite programming rather than permanent hardware, there was little that Cecile had to put “off limits”. When Lawrence was around, the ship simply wouldn’t do anything that hadn’t existed on that first ESA ship, the one taken by Haven.

Unless Lawrence tried to get his own Universal Interface to access the ship, there was basically almost no way for him to go anywhere he shouldn’t or learn anything he shouldn’t, at any time he shouldn’t.

Several days after that tour, a bit over halfway to New Algiers, Richard was met again by Lawrence, this time in a repurposed conference room. Lawrence had no way of knowing that Richard had been going over reports from both Earth and Balzac. But he had succeeded in interrupting Richard exactly when Richard was looking into BEDFORD’s actions. 

Richard’s reports from Earth had been innocuous. Status reports, some background on Haven, and updates from ESA and Evelyn Dean about the situation on New Algiers. The reports from Balzac were more interesting, as Jonathon had been approached by Felicity Lawrence. He was being exceptionally careful, but he was reporting that she seemed open to some level of interaction ‘for the common good’. With an additional source nosing around, Richard felt more able to press Harrison on their meeting.

Lawrence sat down and began speaking almost immediately, “So sir. It seems your mission is what it seems to be.”

Richard raised an eyebrow. “You doubted that?”

“I doubt everything that your CentGov and that mongrel AIL says.”

Richard leaned back and crossed his legs, “Do you go out of your way to be offensive, or are you just a natural?”

Harrison looked puzzled, “How so?”

“A natural then. I was asking,” Richard drew the word out, “Whether you calculated saying things like ‘mongrel’ to be offensive on purpose, or if you genuinely can’t see the issue. It seems option b is the operative one.”

Lawrence shook his head, “I fail to see your point.”

_He does, doesn’t he? His planet is one massively insular society. But that he still fails to understand the attitudes of larger Interstellar society at this point in time seems strange._

Richard shook his head, “Many of the terms you Havenites use for many people on other planets, and for most people on Earth today given the level of genetic mixing that went on in the wake of the Big Collapse, are offensive. Some so much so, they seem intentional on your part.”

Lawrence opened his mouth and Richard interrupted. Deliberately. Rudely. “And it is intentional. In a way. Because you understand, but just barely, that your attitudes offend us for reasons you simply do not get. You wish to call us out on our ‘mongrelization’. Because from where you’re sitting it’s been going on since the Twentieth Century, after Loving v. Virginia. Which is wrong…it’d been going on since the very beginning of the United States.”

Lawrence flushed, and stood up. “What do you mean?!”

Richard stood up as well, “Our collective ancestors were intermingling long before marriage between the so-called ‘races’ became legal. Ask Sally Hemmings. Of course, I’m fine with that. It’s only you Havenites that think that you can even begin to keep yourselves ‘pure’.”

The quotation marks were obvious, and Lawrence simply reddened more, and spat out, “That’s a damned lie. The genetic material sent to Haven was pure. Certifiably!”

“Oh really?” Richard shot back, “Well then, in the unlikely event that that was true and not a pleasant fiction you told yourselves instead of starting out mixed, by your definition, it would have taken at least a few years before the first mixed race babies began arriving.”

Harrison’s hands were clenching now, and Richard began getting nervous about how far he was pushing the large, beefy man. But he couldn’t help himself from lashing out at this representative of a society that had annoyed him for two lifetimes.

Then Harrison said something that made Richard’s blood run cold.

“What would some relic of the past know about modern genetic techniques?!? My planet is pure! It remains pure. I am pure, and I know it! Much better than some savage from the past!” Lawrence shouted.

Richard’s eyes widened and then Harrison Lawrence turned pale.

“What?” Richard snapped.

Lawrence quickly said, “What do you mean, ‘what’?”

“You just said I’m ‘from the past’.”

“I just meant you’re a relic, a throwback. Ignorant of genetic purification methods,” said Harrison.

“No. No, that wasn’t it. That statement was much more precise,” said Richard.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” started Harrison.

“Bullshit,” Richard cut him off with a gesture, then called up Klaatu and contacted Cecile.

“Cecile,” he snapped, speaking rapidly, “Have a crewmember sent down to arrest Mr. Lawrence. Then I need to contact Balzac. Immediately!”

 

When the crewmember arrived, Richard ran up to the bridge where he found that Cecile had just finished making comms contact with the AIL Embassy on Balzac. When the system lit up, Samuel Johnson was already on line. His face was long, and even before Richard could begin speaking he said, “I have some bad news, Director.”

“How bad?” asked Richard.

“Jonathon Dicks is dead. He was murdered. Violently.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So another long break between chapters. This bit in here has been hard. I know what I want to do next and into Act II, so maybe putting words on the screen will come faster.
> 
> How do people who do this for a living manage? I guess if this were my job, instead of my JOB being my job, it'd be a tad easier...


	10. Chapter 9

Richard sat in his stateroom and called up the reports he’d received from Balzac.

The reading was first banal, then grim. There was a series of contact reports involving a progression of meetings with sources, including Oscar Livingston and Felicity Lawrence.

The Livingston reports were interesting insofar as Jonathon had attempted to implement Richard’s straight-ahead recruitment play, appealing to Livingston’s basic sense of decency. Livingston, at least his profile, showed a great deal of animosity to Havenite theories of supremacy. And as far as it went, they were accurate.

But he’d remained a reluctant asset. His contacts with Jonathon over the week and a half, daily meets at a café in the capitol had been inconclusive at best. Until the final meet. Jonathon had logged a no show, and a total absence of contact markers. Then he’d broken protocol and gone looking for Livingston. 

He’d found nothing. He’d logged the no show with the embassy in the SCIF and gone to meet his other prospect. Felicity Lawrence. He’d kept those meetings light, mere contacts, with no actual operational activity. He’d kept his interactions with Felicity well within Richard’s guidelines. The last time he’d logged heading for a meet was 8PM the prior day…a dinner meet given Balzac’s longer day.

That was the last report Jonathon Dicks had logged.

The coroner’s report was a different matter.

 

[Subject is a male, nominal, apparent age approx. 25 Earth years old. Subject presents with cerulean hair, yellow eyes, and extremely pale skin color, all the result of nanite use. Subject was discovered at approx. 6AM (0600 hours), Middleday, 24 London, 2432 CE in unofficial off-embassy quarters, dead of massive thoracic trauma.]

[Blood tests indicate no toxins or drugs in the system at time of death. Subject death was caused by exsanguination and shock following internal organ damage and partial removal during assault. Subject has partially nanite mitigated damage to the throat, larynx, and carotid artery, as well as defense wounds on both right and left forearms. Subject also has stab wounds to face and eyes, presumably delivered post-mortem, as no evidence of nanite mitigation is evidenced with those wounds.]

[Subject was naked in his bed at time of discovery by co-worker Frederica Sugawara (see holos, 4 through 15, attached).]

 

The attached holos showed Jonathon on his back in a bed absolutely covered in drying blood and laying in a congealing pool of more blood that was covering a large portion of his mattress, his face cut up and his throat slit. Most of the blood came from his chest and abdomen, which had been sliced open and a number of the major organs, less his heart and lungs, had been partially pulled from his body.

 

[Subject had both salivary and vaginal secretions on his face and penis, genetically identified as belonging to Felicity Lawrence. Position of defense wounds and stab wounds on face are consistent with a broad bladed, double edged knife wielded by a right-handed person of Felicity Lawrence’s height and arm length.]

[Footprints matching those of Felicity Lawrence (see attached holos, 22 through 27) were found leading to Jonathon Dicks’ bathroom and consist of blood matching that of Jonathon Dicks. In addition, remains of vomit were found under the rim of Mr. Dick’s toilet, with foods matching those of the last reported meal of Felicity Lawrence while on Balzac.]

 

These holos showed a trail of bloody footprints, leading to the toilet and to the shower. A trail of almost bloodless footprints led away from the shower.

Clearly Jonathon had not actually followed Richard’s guidelines. He’d attempted to seduce Felicity, and she’d…slaughtered…one of his people. Richard stared at the pictures. He was trying not to lose his temper. Losing agents had always upset Richard.

_I told him…TOLD him…to keep contacts with that woman light and surface. He had to go and try and force it. Was he glory hounding or trying to find out about Livingston?_

Richard read on.

 

[Based on nanite decay rates, time of death was exactly 12:30:45 PM (2530 hours), Twoday, 23 London. Based on recorded stress hormone levels, the fatal assault began at 12:26:17 PM (2526 hours) that same day.]

[Conclusion: Based on nanite records, and additional genetic evidence on the body and in the apartment of Jonathon Dicks of Earth, his murder was most likely perpetrated post coitus by Ms. Felicity Lawrence of Haven. The motive for that murder is unknown at this time, but presumably will be linked to ongoing political tensions between their respective planets.]

 

The next report was considerably briefer than the Jonathon’s.

 

[Oscar Livingston was found dead from a gunshot wound to the head at 7:34:34 AM (0734 hours), Middleday, 24 London, 2432CE by Officer Horace Gates of the Balzac Planetary Police Department based on an ongoing investigation of the murder of Jonathon Dicks by Felicity Lawrence.]

[The body was found in his apartment, tied to a chair and crudely gagged, apparently to preclude Mr. Livingston summoning his personal network assistant and using its voice activated emergency services. Nanite records show that his stress hormone levels spiked at 13:23:56 PM (1323 hours), Twoday, 23 London, 2432 CE and remained somewhat to highly elevated until his death at 00:13:25 AM (0013 hours), Middleday, 24 London, 2432 CE from a single gunshot wound to the head, delivered from behind, at an angle consistent with the height and hand placement of Felicity Lawrence.]

[That inference is supported by the time of travel from Jonathon Dicks’ (see Coroner Report 0A-459-32) residence to Oscar Livingston’s apartment of 18 minutes via cab, and the likely time for a cursory physical cleanup by Ms. Lawrence at Mr. Dicks’ apartment.]

[There were traces of biological material, likely blood, on the carpet corresponding to Jonathon Dicks, presumably transported by Felicity Lawrence.]

 

Richard sat back after swiping the virtual report next to Jonathon’s autopsy on his “desktop”. He sighed.

_So the bitch kidnapped Livingston, and probably extracted information from him about Jonathon. At the same time, Jonathon pulled a rookie mistake and pushed a bad situation in an attempt to save an asset. How did she know to blackbag Livingston? Doesn’t matter. It’ll probably turn out to be a casual comment by someone in the literary community._

_Then my poor bastard of an officer arranges a meet with Lawrence, and they have sex, maybe a repeat engagement, maybe not…again, doesn’t matter. He probably tried to find out what she might have known. I think she was there for one reason only._

Richard closed his eyes, mentally recreating the sequence of events.

_She goes to see Jonathon, and given she brought that toadsticker, with murder on her mind. She has sex with him, I imagine to get him to let his guard down, but possibly for the sheer sadistic joy of it, and then she tried to kill him with a slash to the neck. But that didn’t work, she didn’t go deep enough and the nanites fought back with rapid clotting. She started stabbing him. Somewhere in there she became enraged. Why? Then she mutilates his face and eyes, probably symbolically for her own needs, the same as the organs. Dear god that was a violent assault._

_She’s sick, either because of what she’s done, what he looks like, or having had sex with a mongrel…though I suspect that’s not it. I meant what I told Harrison. I’d bet good money, if that were still a thing on Earth, that the white Havenites are not restraining themselves vis a vis the slaves._

_In either case, she lurches into the bathroom, covered in gore, and throws up. Then she takes a shower. Hard to cross town, even in an autonomous cab, utterly drenched in blood. She’s regaining her cool._

_Which she then displays by blowing Livingston’s head off with no sign of emotion as far as I can tell from the scene, leaves, and gets off the planet ASAP._

Richard opened his eyes. He looked at a holo of Livingston’s gunshot wound. Then he let out a small relieved sigh. There was an entrance wound. Which meant that whatever else Haven had figured out, tunneling guns were something they didn’t have. Small favors in a dumpster fire of a day.

Richard called out his interface and commed Cecile, “Is the prisoner in a state to receive visitors?”

Cecile frowned, “Do you think my crew would damage him in any way?”

Richard grimaced, “No, of course not. I apologize if you inferred that. I just meant, is he calm enough or is he still venting?”

Cecile nodded, although her expression was still a bit severe with Richard, “Oui. He is as calm as he can be.”

“I’ll be down shortly.”

 

Richard looked through the one-way wall. It turned out that you could even program “interrogation room” into one of the Chameleon’s multi-purpose spaces. Harrison Lawrence was sitting quietly, handcuffed to the table.

Hannelore was watching him when Richard entered. She said, without turning, “That fucker has barely moved. Nothing.”

Then she turned and looked at Richard. “I want to gut him for what he did to Jonathon. I want him to suffer. I want to see him squirm.”

Richard nodded and said, “That’s why I’m doing this,” and when Hannelore glared at him, he raised a hand and went on, “You brought me back because I have experience. Well, this is one of the things I have experience with…losing people due to opposition action. I wish I could say you won’t learn too. I wish to god I could tell you won’t get used to it. But you will. On both counts.”

As Hannelore opened her mouth to reply, Cecile walked into the room. Hannelore’s mouth snapped shut. Richard looked at them both.

“Hannelore, I am going to go in there and try to learn everything I can, but realistically it’s not likely to be much. And in the end, we’ll hang onto this guy to use as a bargaining chip somewhere down the line. If you’re hoping for revenge, you’re in the wrong business. Professionals don’t do ‘payback’. They can’t afford it. I can’t afford it.”

He stared Hannelore down, “Are you going to be OK with that?”

She stared at her feet. Then she nodded, once. Curtly. Richard reached out and squeezed her shoulder. “OK. I’m going to go in and see what I can see.”

Cecile, her expression unreadable, opened the connecting door, and Richard stepped in. Lawrence glanced up at him and then resumed a rather thorough inspection of his hands.

Richard sat down, across from Lawrence. “So.”

Lawrence said nothing.

“Want to confess something? No? Ok, how about we talk about me?”

Lawrence started slightly.

Jensen leaned forward, “Look, Harrison. Clearly you know who I am, if not entirely, then enough. So how did you know?”

Lawrence shook his head, again not saying anything.

Richard leaned back, “Do you have any idea how deep in it you really are? Do you think this ends with us releasing you, a diplomat, because that’s what treaties say needs to happen?”

Richard leaned back in, “This isn’t Cold War One or Two. There ARE no rules governing how to treat spies. Official cover or not. And since you know who I am, I can at least state that we know you are a Havenite spy. And we really don’t have any obligations to repatriate you to Haven, even if we didn’t already have a damn good reason to hold you.”

Lawrence looked up, and simply smirked. Richard gazed back impassively, “Your sister apparently wanted a little extracurricular activity with one of mine. I don’t mind that part. The part where she butchered him and left the planet, I do mind.”

Lawrence jumped, and actually said, “Wha-,” before he clammed up again.

Richard nodded, and now that he could see Lawrence’s eyes, went on, “Oh yes. She left you, her dear brother, holding the bag. She, and your ride, left Balzac orbit early today. I have an Intelligence Officer out there who would just as soon shove you in an airlock and cycle it as continue to look at you. I think it’s only through sheer willpower she hasn’t already done so.”

Now Lawrence’s eyes flashed, and he regained some of his old bravado, “So now, you will discover a need to leave the room and your associate will come in and play ‘bad cop’.”

Richard smiled and shook his head, “You’ve seen too many movies. I’m it. Your interrogator is me. She’s not coming in here. Work with me. You’re not going anywhere. I’m not going anywhere. You aren’t going home. This is it, Harrison. This is all you get. The junior partner left you holding the bag.”

As Richard said ‘junior partner’ Harrison went motionless.

_Huh. Suddenly he goes poker-face._

“Your sister killed two people, one of mine and one of the Zola’s, a minor functionary who wasn’t thrilled about your interference on his planet. After the slaughter she fled the planet, abandoning you. At a time when she knew there was no getting away for you.”

Lawrence said, “So? Based on your say so, I’m supposed to believe you? You could fake anything.”

Richard nodded. “I could. Which is why I’m not bothering. The Zola is getting an advanced briefing on Balzac. Because Mission Commander Asselin is bringing in the full planetary contingent on board the Chameleon to brief them in an hour. You’re about to be persona non-grata.”

Richard let his voice drop, “But what I really want to know is how you found out about me. It’s not exactly common knowledge that CentGov thawed out a fossil for the sole purpose of countering you.”

As Harrison leaned in, Richard began modulating his voice up and down, but not predictably, “So how did you learn? I’d bet anything you didn’t know. At first, you kept trying to bait me as a Twain scholar. Somehow between then and now you learned it. Was it before you left Balzac? After? How?”

“Why should I tell you?” Harrison said.

“Why not? It’ll all come out when we review communication logs.”

“You think the logs will tell you anything? They won’t tell you anything.”

Richard glanced up. “Why not?”

“Felicity wouldn’t have left tracks…”

Then Lawrence suddenly clammed up.

Richard sat back down. “Why wouldn’t she? It’s not like she had your resources. She was just a socialite. A violent, vengeful socialite, but still...”

Harrison laughed abruptly. “You think SHE was the junior partner? HER? Oh, this is rich. The sanctimonious Earthpeople, so egalitarian. You never saw it.”

And suddenly Richard did.

_This guy looks and acts like a beefwitted racist good ol’ boy because he is. It’s not a cover. He isn’t using a smokescreen; he IS the smokescreen._

Richard nodded once curtly, and left, poker faced. Lawrence knew he’d gotten a shot in, but Richard would be damned if was going to let Lawrence know how bad it was.

When he’d gotten to the observation room, Hannelore was there, her expression just shy of shocked. Richard looked over at the crewperson in the room. “Is this section totally soundproofed from over there,” and he jerked a thumb at the one way wall.

The woman nodded, and then said, “Absolutely. You could set off a bomb in here and no one on that side of the wall would notice anything…”

The crewperson’s eyes widened as Richard whirled, yelled very loudly, and punched the bulkhead, hard.

“Ow! Fuck!” Richard shook his hand. Then he looked up at Hannelore, “I missed it. I fucking missed all of it. He,” and Richard pointed with his already healing hand, “Isn’t BEDFORD. Felicity is BEDFORD. I left Jonathon alone on that planet with a goddamned cobra.”

Hannelore reached out and took Richard’s already nearly healed hand in a way that so reminded him of Olivia he very nearly burst into tears. “Boss, no. You couldn’t have known. All our briefings pointed at him.”

Richard just shook his head, “It’s my job…MY job…to think of the shit you guys haven’t because you never lived in this world. I may have let you and Evelyn down, but I utterly failed Jonathon. He is dead now, and it’s because I arrogantly assumed I knew so much more than all you people…”

Hannelore tugged at Richard’s hand until he looked over. “No boss. It’s as much our fault as yours. We looked down on you,” and she nodded when he shook his head, “We did. We looked down on you as a fossil. A relic we needed but didn’t want to have to need. And it showed in how we treated you. Of course you reacted to it.”

Richard stood very still. Then he shook his head one time, turned and left the room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not dead yet, although I _have_ gone to YET ANOTHER workflow setup, by going all Word. What can I say? I use it all the time for work...I write ON it at lunch and after office hours. Editting at work in Word, bringing it back, opening it in Pages to transfer it to Scrivener is _bonkers_. And may have contributed to some of the friction that has so greivously slowed my work pace. At least I can remove THAT roadblock. The need to work so as to pay the mortgage and buy food? Well, let's say we don't live in Richard and Evelyn's future yet...


	11. Chapter 10

Richard made his way along the companionway back to his room. His thoughts were a whirl. He thought back to his time a very young officer at the CIA. His first posting was to Honduremala, cultivating low level assets in the Policia Nacional. He thought of the mistakes he’d made.

There hadn’t been bloody many. He realized as he entered his quarters and sank into a chair, that he’d fucked up as thoroughly as he ever had, and more often in the last few weeks as all the rest of his entire career, combined.

_Hell, maybe they should put me back on ice and wake up Laura, just to get the competent Jensen working for them. God, I miss you, honey._

Richard shook his head, thinking. He was going to have to brief Evelyn Dean, get her up to speed. He contacted the communication officer, and asked for Earth, Ms. Dean, to be contacted, and the call put through to his cabin. Then he sat, and brooded.

 

The call came through less than an hour later, and when Richard stood up, Dean waved him to sit.

“I’d prefer to stand, ma’am,” he said. “Especially given that you have every right to demand my resignation. Hell, you have it, on the condition that you thaw out Laura to replace me.”

Dean shook her head, “That won’t be necessary, or desirable, I think.”

Richard sat down, but remained sitting up straight.

Dean turned and fiddled with her desk, then picked up a fizzy clear drink. When she sipped it, it was clear it was bitter, and presumably a drug. Probably a Vodka Tonic. Or something similar. She waved at him, “For pity’s sake Richard, join me.”

Richard sighed. Then he called up Klaatu and had it call up a single malt whisky. A double. After he’d taken a sip, he said, “OK. Let me have it.”

“What? That Jonathon Dicks did something you told him not to do, and that neither of you knew was as dangerous as it was because CentGov…because I…fed you bogus info? Even accidentally?”

Richard looked up in shock, because this was new. Dean went on.

“Look, we should have checked more thoroughly. We shouldn’t have been so sure we had IDed the head Havenite. His sister was with him all those times. Lawrence was right, we DID assume it was him. Not very egalitarian at all. I suppose in our defense we were assuming Haven social sex roles were more rigid than they were.”

“Or that maybe there’s always an exception,” interrupted Richard. Dean nodded.

“Or that. Richard, there’s plenty of blame to go around, and you are far from the worst offender in this awful situation,” Dean said, then she too, sat.

“So now what?” asked Richard.

Dean shook her head, “No. We thawed out an expert for good reasons…maybe we should at least shut up and let him do his job.”

Richard sat back genuinely shocked. “Look, no offense, but back in the Twenty First, you would NOT be taking the blame. I’m a little at a loss here.”

Dean smiled, and shook her head. She gestured, and Richard’s door slid open.

He jumped.

_I didn’t know they could DO that._

Hannelore walked in, and sat down as well, taking another whisky that had just appeared on the low table and sipping. She smiled.

“I was networked in, boss,” she said as she sat back. “Sorry, but we didn’t exactly clue you in on all of a universal interface’s capabilities.”

Richard chuckled, “They’re a terminal, and terminals can network. I should have seen it. Add that to my list,” he added as he sipped.

Dean shook her head, “I admit, we may have kept some aspects of how UIs work to ourselves, but I think that little demonstration stepped on Hannelore’s observations.”

Hannelore nodded, “Back in the old days, you’d expect a boss who fucked up to push the blame as far down and as far away from themselves as possible, yes? Well, for a number of reasons that’s not how it works anymore.”

Dean added, “First, reputation and skill count for a lot, and can’t be faked, not long term. So Earth society got out of the habit of finger pointing as a regular exercise. Eventually the bullshit artists would be found out.”

Hannelore added, “And I read a LOT about your time in preparation for waking you. CentGov society provides a quite comfortable living to everyone, so one of the things that leads to cover-ups and blame shifting…fear that you’ll get fired and won’t be able to pay the mortgage…isn’t really a factor anymore. Earth is inhabited by a population at about 1970 levels, using Twenty Fifth century technology. There isn’t want. Not for physical comfort.”

Richard said, “So Evelyn here owns up to her screw-ups. Underlings aren’t the only ones to fall on their swords.”

“And these days the swords are nerf, anyway,” Dean said. At Richard’s look she added, “Hannelore and Jonathon weren’t the only ones who read up on your time.”

Richard’s shoulders slumped at the latter name.

Evelyn said, “Don’t blame yourself.”

Richard replied, “But I do. And really, I should. Just because you correctly point out the blame is shared doesn’t change the fact that I left him alone. I could have suspended activities for a month while we traveled. I could have ignored the Chair’s request and left Hannelore, who might well have caught on to Jonathon’s off the ranch activities.” Richard sighed heavily and took a gulp. “But that’s water under the bridge at this point. The real point is, ‘What now?’”

“What now indeed,” said Evelyn.

Hannelore started ticking off notes on her fingers, “First, while there is no reason at this point not to continue to New Algiers given we’re practically there already, I’m certain that Balzac will go for an AIL relationship. Second, the New Algiers folks will no doubt get an earful from the Byron and the Chair. That won’t hurt. Third, it gives us even more time with BEDFORD to interrogate him…”

Richard interrupted, “BEDFORD is whoever is running Haven’s operation. Felicity Lawrence is BEDFORD. Not Harrison.”

Hannelore nodded, “Fine. I guess that makes Harrison BELLE. At any rate, we know we have him until he gets back to Earth. After that, he might stay with us, he might get sent back to Haven, anything might happen, depending on CentGov.”

“Is there going to be external political pressure to repatriate or internal pressure to punish him?” asked Richard.

“CentGov doesn’t really have to worry. He’s conducted an attack on AIL as a whole, and what Haven and Avalon want is of no current concern. As for public opinion? Most of Earth won’t even notice something happened. Half of them probably don’t even pay attention to Haven’s existence, let alone a diplomatic incident involving them 18 light years away,” Dean said.

Richard made a face, but he added, “I suppose that works. At least we can contain the information and squeeze him for anything we can get.”

Hannelore added, “Director Jenkins and I can continue the interrogations while we’re onboard. There’s probably an upper limit to how much we can really get out of him though.”

“Time?” asked Dean.

Richard nodded. “It takes time to establish a good rapport, and besides, he dislikes me personally and Hannelore on principle. Best if you have someone who really looks the part ready to go when we arrive home. And nothing else we could do would produce reliable intel.”

Evelyn nodded, then finished her drink in a gulp. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s stay in contact, but I think the Balzac situation can be considered concluded. And while I’m sure you want to argue, Richard, remember what I said when you left. Any outcome that ends with Balzac not in Haven’s orbit was a success. The planet ending up in AIL was an outstanding success. Whatever the cost.”

 

The voyage out to New Algiers was thankfully uneventful from then on. 

Richard and Hannelore spent a good deal of time in company with Bennet and Schiller while they visited New Algiers. The Chair, his delegation, and the Byron and hers, spread out over the planet, joined in both cases by what was left of the Naturalists’ delegation. By common consent, and by the direction of an extremely irked Zola, they were instructed to stick with the other two factions, in large part as a show of cultural solidarity.

New Algiers was Earthlike, mostly. The fifth planet in orbit around Procyon A, it was in fact a little colder than normal. New Algiers was farther out in the habitable zone of Procyon, and the average temperature was 7 degrees Celsius. The area that the original probe had landed in, and thus founded the colony in, greatly resembled southern Alaska, or western Canada: large coniferous-like vegetation adapted to cool damp conditions. The light from the sun, however, was considerably bluer, and the noonday sun was harsh. You couldn’t even begin to glance in its direction.

The New Algierians proved incredibly hospitable, friendly, and xenophilic. They eagerly showed the Balzackians how they interacted with traders from AIL. There was a great deal of trade with New Algiers, as it possessed some first rate programmers and mathematicians. In the process, the Balzackians also made some contacts for future commercial contacts, as the New Algerians had some ideas for them to update the writing attribution process in the Balzac interface network.

Richard was as amused as his mood would let him be at that information. The people of Balzac were as invested in properly tracking literary credit as any scientist would be about proper methods and data documentation. When he heard about New Algiers’ offer he’d chuckled and then moved on to yet another committee meeting about how to handle BEDFORD once the mission on Balzac was over.

The BEDFORD committee didn’t exactly metastasize, but only because it was as secret as a government in total control of communication methods and information technology could make it. Instead, it was made up of a limited, but large enough to be annoying, group of people who were genuinely worried about what BEDFORD was up to, where she was, how she’d learned of Richard’s history, and when she’d transmitted the knowledge to BELLE.

Over the next week, Bennet and Schiller met with a number of representatives of New Algiers trading consortia, frequently ensuring that Raquin was involved via message links. By the end of that period, Balzac had a commercial pact with several New Algerian software companies, and Jensen had secured an assurance that all three factions on Balzac would support a measure to join AIL, making it the sixth planet to join the alliance.

On the trip back, Richard continued his primary job, squeezing BELLE dry about anything he knew about BEDFORD. As a result, Richard and the AIL/CentGov Intelligence apparatus learned a fair amount about BEDFORD, although with an asterisk regarding BELLE’s reliability.

It put him one up on some of the dossiers Richard had had regarding Russian Federation FSB and GRU higher ups. Some of them had never been (knowingly) photographed, and their mere existence only inferred from their effects on known sections of the Russian bureaucracy or leadership.

As Richard learned, BEDFORD had been a precocious girl on Haven. Highly intelligent and supremely manipulative from the beginning she hadn’t so much bucked Havenite sexual and gender stereotypes as treated them as irrelevant to her life.

She was perfectly capable of manipulating men with sex…or so Richard inferred from her brother’s rare statements about lovers. BEDFORD may have considered Haven’s mores of no import, but BELLE himself was very much a product of them and proved reluctant to discuss BEDFORD’s sexual history in any great detail. Nevertheless, a pattern did emerge. Anyone smitten by BEDFORD soon learned how mistaken they were, were they rash enough to oppose her wishes. 

In addition, she seemed if not actually sociopathic then highly goal directed. It was certain from BELLE’s interviews that if BEDFORD was actually capable of empathy then she could easily discount it if she saw a need to. 

She was athletic, but not excessively so. She had a rare musical talent and possessed a perfect understanding of pitch, if not perfect tone in her singing voice. Richard wasn’t exactly certain what use could be made of that fact, but he filed it away with other revelations about his sister provided by BELLE. 

Based on her actions on Balzac, she was decisive. She’d easily cut her losses and ran when her plans for that planet were destroyed by Richard’s own machinations. Or, if not ‘easily’ then decisively. Of all her traits, that one impressed and alarmed Richard in equal measure. It was a rare individual who could ignore all sunk costs and walk away with nary a backwards glance when the risks versus rewards of moving forward became negative. Richard certainly wasn’t one of those people, and that BEDFORD apparently was made her very dangerous.

Richard’s self-assessment was that BEDFORD was almost certainly a better ‘spy’ than he was. She was more decisive, more dedicated and zealous, and certainly considerably more ruthless than he was. All he had going for him was a much longer history in the shadow world. 

BEDFORD had never seriously been opposed before. Richard had won this round simply because he had, at least temporarily, been more of an unknown quantity to Felicity Lawrence than BEDFORD had been to Richard. That wasn’t going to remain the case.

 

Four and a half weeks later, Richard and Hannelore found themselves on the bridge of the Chameleon as Cecile and her crew docked the ship with Quito Upper a bit over four months after it had left. Cecile and Hannelore were overjoyed to learn that CentGov, ESA, and AIL were not breaking up a successful team, and that the ESS Chameleon and Mission Commander Asselin had been placed at Director Jensen’s disposal for the foreseeable future.

So it was with a kiss and, “À bientôt, ma chere,” that Cecile sent Hannelore out the airlock with Richard. Between them was a very sullen, very shackled hand and foot Harrison Lawrence, BELLE himself. As the three of them made their slow way down the gangway, Richard saw the far lock open and his boss Evelyn Dean along with several soldiers come to take possession of the prisoner.

As two rather grim faced young people, a woman and a man, took up positions to either side of BELLE, and then escorted him around the corner, Evelyn smiled and shook Richard’s hand.

“I know this hasn’t been easy, Richard,” she said, “But you achieved everything CentGov could have hoped to have asked of you.”

Richard nodded as he took Evelyn’s hand. Then someone else came around the corner into the lock.

She was a bit over average height, slender, and graceful. She had dark hair, and smoky, hazel eyes. She stood with one hand on a hip, smiling playfully. There was something about her eyes…

“Hi, honey. They woke me up about 2 weeks ago. How do you like the new body?” asked Laura.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good news! I am three chapters ahead now and picking up speed. In other words, I've built a buffer and should be able to post much more regularly.


End file.
